Fruits of majority rule in South Africa: called in to quell black crime

Until 1994, voting in South Africa was restricted to whites and "honorary whites" (like Japanese), with a limited franchise for "Asians" (= South Asians) and "coloured" (= people of mixed race). If you were black -- sometimes identifiable by the measurement of your lips -- you couldn't vote at all. This was just one aspect of the apartheid (= separate development) system for which South Africa condemned as hopeless neadnderthal racists by liberals and "right-thinking people" around the world.

All that changed on 27 April 1994 when all citizens were allowed to vote, regardless of colour. The result -- a foregone conclusion -- was just what the gliberals and United Nations demanded -- "majority rule". Saint Nelson Mandela became the first black president, and blacks -- the majority in question -- were at last empowered and given their rightful place at the trough. April 27th is now a national holiday -- "Freedom Day".

Those who suggested that the majority were perhaps "not quite ready" to run their country, and that South Africa would "go back to bush, like the countries north of the Limpopo" were dismissed as sore losers, churls, racists, yada yada yada.

In 1994, the murder rate in Cape Town, seat of South Africa's parliament, was on the order of 20 per 100,000 people. Not great, but also not as bad as places like, errr, Chicago. By Y2K it had shot up to 45 per 100,000. In the first six months of this year -- the 25th year of majority rule -- nearly 2000 people were murdered in the Western Cape (Cape Town's province), according to Albert Fritz, a provincial official tasked with ensuring community safety.

Mr Fritz spoke following more than a dozen murders over one weekend in June. "Many of our most vulnerable residents in the province are living in a war zone," he told the meeja. Most of the bloodshed has been in black and coloured areas, particularly a vast area called Cape Flats, where high rates of unemployment and drug abuse have fuelled gang activity.

In a crime made headlines last week, six women between ages 18 and 26 were killed when unknown gunmen entered a home and opened fire. The next day, another five men, aged 18 to 39, were shot dead and one was injured in two separate shooting incidents in Philippi, one of the shanty towns within Cape Flats.

Police Minister Bheki Cele visited Philippi following the "incidents" to announce that the national government will shortly deploy a battalion of soldiers to help police quell a surge in violence in gang-infested parts of Cape Town, a step normally only taken over the Christmas and New Year period when crime spikes in poorer neighbourhoods. This initiative will be known as "Operation PROSPER". Seriously.

Hardly a lasting solution, according to Gareth Newham, of the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, who called it "a short-term, unsustainable response to a crisis." But what would he know? He's a whitey, obviously a racist living (in his mind) in pre-Freedom Day South Africa. Why doesn't he just leave, as so many other "white flees" have done and go to a safe place like, errr, Chicago.

Footnote: In a report this year by the The Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, only three of the world's top 50 most dangerous cities not from the Americas 50 were in South Africa, with Cape Town at 11th overall with a homicide rate of 66.36 per 100,000 residents.