Craig T. answered • 09/25/20
B.A. in Anthropology and Archaeology
My family has a house in South Africa, about an hours drive east of Cape Town, which was designed and built by my step-father. He grew up in South Africa and attended boarding school. Most of the people that live in South Africa are indigenous. The Dutch white people also known as the Afrikaners colonized the area in the 1600's and ruled until the end of apartheid in 1990-1994 when a Black man, named Nelson Mandela became President, after spending years imprisoned by the Afrikaners. During Apartheid, the Indigenous people, who were in the majority, were brutally treated both physically and by the laws of the minority whites. With the end of apartheid things changed significantly for awhile. Now the country, although now ruled by the Black majority, is still extremely segregated. Afrikaners and the Indigenous peoples do not mix socially or live together. The black rulers recently have been very corrupt and do little to help even their own peoples. Poverty is still very prevalent especially in the shanty towns that surround industrialized cities. Most whites are well to do and either have fortunes due to the gold, diamond, wine and ostrich trade and share little of the wealth with the original peoples of South Africa. Thus, even thought apartheid on paper is a thing of the past; there is still much to done to have a fair system of Government for all the people, which is similar to the current situation in the United States, where there is no longer slavery, but there is still much to be accomplished to end segregation and mistreatment of African-Americans.
