Panel discusses South African strife
By Chris Russell
Collegian Staff
South Africa is still grappling with the legacy of apartheid 14 years after the policy was made illegal, according to a panel titled "Racial Conflict and Transformation in South Africa" held last Thursday night in the Campus Center at the University of Massachusetts.
The multi-disciplinary panel said that South Africa faces many social, economic and political problems, and could not presently be called a "peaceful" society.
Upon South Africa's transition to democracy in 1994 there were "huge race-based inequalities" according to James Heintz, associate director of the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass.
Heintz blamed this on apartheid, the policy of racial segregation that had kept the black majority economically, socially and politically inferior to the white minority.
In 1994 apartheid was made illegal and Nelson Mandela was elected President in South Africa's first democratic elections, which was also the first time a black African held any position in the government.
The new government relied mostly on the free market to improve peoples' economic situation. They feared a radical redistribution of wealth would cause business and capital to leave South Africa.
According to Heintz this has mostly "favored people who already have wealth," leaving millions of poor blacks no better off then they were under apartheid.
Inequalities also have persisted in access to basic needs, such as healthcare.
According to Jeremy Sarkin, professor of law at Hofstra University, the predominately black, public healthcare system is marred by "long waits, inadequate facilities and insufficient funds." It serves 90 percent of the population, but accounts for 10 percent of healthcare spending.
The predominately white private system, on the other hand, is "world class healthcare," and serves 10 percent of the population, but accounts for 90 percent of the spending.
Sarkin expanded on apartheid's influence on present day South Africa by discussing the prison system and the amount of police brutality in the country.
South Africa ranks number 14 for their amount of prisoners in the world and 569 people died in policy captivity last year.
The similarities to apartheid are clear, according to the panel discussion: between 1984 and 1986, when black activism and opposition to the government were at their height, security forces killed 2000 and arrested 26,000.
The security forces relied on the system of torture, murder and intimidation to maintain the apartheid system, according to the lectures.
Thomas Pettigrew, professor of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz discussed this when he talked about his experiences with the security forces during a visit to South Africa in 1956.
He compared the South African secret police - the 'Special Branch' - to Hitler's Gestapo and spoke about how they spied on him for attending African National Congress (ANC) meetings. The ANC was one of the main black opposition groups, leading the police to threaten "to throw me out of the country if I kept attending meetings."
Pettigrew - who is white - also had to keep associations with black friends secret.
"To go to dinner with my African friend we had to violate the law, and so much of African life was like that," he said.
Chris Russell can be reached at crussell@student.umass.edu.
