An Economic Apartheid Persists in South Africa
working age population is officially employed.
The governing party, the African National Congress, built empires of new housing for black South Africans, but concentrated it in the townships, reinforcing the geographic strictures of apartheid. Those with jobs often endure commutes of an hour or more on private minibuses that take a big chunk out of their paychecks.
“We never dismantled apartheid,” said Ayabonga Cawe, a former economist for Oxfam. “The patterns of enrichment and impoverishment are still the same.”
South Africa had to re- engineer an economy dominated by mining and expand into pursuits like tourism and agriculture, while overcoming a legacy of colonial exploitation, racial oppression and global isolation, the results of decades of international sanctions.
Even so, from 1998 to 2008, the economy expanded by roughly 3.5 percent a year, doubling the size of the black middle class. The government built millions of homes, extended the reach of clean water and electricity, and handed out cash grants to millions of poor people.
But the global financial crisis of 2008 ravaged South Africa, destroying demand for the mineral deposits at the center of its economy. It wiped out half of the roughly two million new jobs that had been created in the previous four years.
Today, South Africa is a land of astonishing contrasts.
In the Sea Point neighborhood of Cape Town, a sweep of apartments and restaurants alongside the Atlantic Ocean, women gather on the beach for a yoga class — some black, some white, some Asian. Children of multiple races scamper through a playground, a scene unthinkable during apartheid.
To the east, Judith Sikade’s tin roof is one of many. There, people cook over coal fires. Children run barefoot on paths littered with broken glass. Grown-ups exchange word of the latest robbery. They keep an eye out for the police, who tear down the shacks, given that they sit on private land. “Where’s the freedom?” Ms. Sikade said, anger rising in her voice. “Where are the changes?”
Growing up in a township near Durban, on South Africa’s east coast, Siyabonga Mzulwini placed his faith in the transformative powers of education.
During apartheid, black education had been a consignment to permanent poverty. The Bantu educational system had been set up to churn out vast numbers of low- skilled, lowwage black workers to feed into mining operations.
Four years ago, Mr. Mzulwini graduated with a business degree from a technical university.
He and three partners registered a company, hoping to get a government contract reserved for blackowned companies. But when they applied for loans, the banks turned them away. They had no collateral.
Ten percent of all South Africans — the majority white — owns more than 90 percent of national wealth. Some 80 percent of the population — overwhelmingly black — owns nothing at all.
This was both the product of colonialism, and the negotiated price of ending apartheid. To gain the National Party’s assent to elections, the A. N.C. forswore major transfers of land from white to black control.
The new government confronted huge budget deficits and great demands for housing and electricity. Building required loans from global investors, and land transfers risked spooking markets.
The government satisfied international markets and set the townships buzzing with construction. Yet this approach came at a cost, one Mr. Mzu- lwini and his partners were effectively bearing. They were operating with the same assets their families had owned during apartheid — nothing.
They purchased lawn mowers, aiming to bid on government contracts to cut the grass alongside local highways. They came away disappointed.
One day, Mr. Mzulwini bumped into a classmate who was working at City Hall.
“He told me that unless we paid a 10,000 rand bribe (about $737), we would never get any business,” Mr. Mzulwini recalled. “He said if I gave him the money to give his boss, his boss would open doors for us.”
That sum was wildly beyond reach. So Mr. Mzulwini and his partners eyed contracts to help build government-furnished houses. They approached a construction company to seek a role as a subcontractor.
Rebuffed again, Mr. Mzulwini and his partners linked up with a federation of businesses operating as a platform for would- be black entrepreneurs frustrated by the situation.
Federation brethren descended on a construction site and threatened to shake the scaffolding if workers did not cease. The disruption gained Mr. Mzulwini a spot in a government program training bricklayers.
The following year, Mr. Mzulwini and his partners secured contracts to do brick work, netting profits of about $5,150.
“Being radical and forceful is what has given me hope,” Mr. Mzulwini said. He is less optimistic for his country. “The system doesn’t work.”
The system does work, though often for the benefit of the people running it. People like Marcus Moloeli. “I always knew as a child there was something greater,” he said. “I was always curious, ‘What is in there that I can’t have access to?’”
At 38, Mr. Moloeli no longer needs to wonder.
He lives in a gated community north of Durban, on the Indian Ocean. His two-story house boasts a pair of garages holding two Mercedes and an Audi, plus a golf cart he drives to the country club at the complex.
“It’s a good environment for me to reflect,” he said.
After graduating from a technical school, he volunteered for a government-run youth league. That turned into a staff position for President Zuma, overseeing youth affairs.
Two years ago, he started a business advising local governments on managing their infrastructure. Soon, he was rich.
The ranks of black, Asian and mixed-race millionaires expanded to 17,300 from 6,200 from 2007 to 2015.
Soweto, a township outside Johannesburg, holds special resonance as a cradle of the anti-apartheid movement. It was the home of Nelson Mandela, and the site of a 1976 uprising that set off a crackdown so brutal that images were broadcast around the world.
Then, Vilakazi Street, where Mr. Mandela once lived, was a rutted dirt track lacking electricity. Today, it is a lively testament to South Africa’s black middle class, which more than doubled from 2004 to 2013, reaching 4.2 million.
On a Saturday night, the street throbs with nightclubs blasting house music. Black professionals in chic clothes fill tables, lifting cocktails.
Colin Amos greets customers arriving at his restaurant and bar, Next Door. A black doctor with his own practice in Soweto, he opened the place last year as a side project, partnering with two friends.
Here might be an example of post-apartheid black entrepreneurialism. Yet Mr. Amos views his experience as something else — an illustration of how the economy remains tilted against black people.
The electricity frequently cuts off, which forced him to purchase a costly generator. The restaurant next door gets most of the international visitors, owing to a relationship with the tourism authorities.
The gated community where he lives north of Johannesburg is full of white families who inherited their property, he said, plus a few black families struggling to pay their mortgages.
“We’re sitting on a serious time bomb,” said Mr. Amos’s business partner, Bongi Vilakazi. “Everyone I talk to is of the mind that we need to take what is rightfully ours.”