Apartheid in South Africa looked after white people and nobody else. Now some of its white communities face a level of deprivation, or of violence, which threatens their future in the country.
White people are still riding high. They run the economy. They have a disproportionate amount of influence in politics and the media. They still have the best houses and most of the best jobs.
But working-class white people, most of them Afrikaans-speakers, are going through an intense crisis. Across South Africa there could be as many as 400,000 poor whites living in squalid squatter camps with no water and no electricity and perhaps just one or two basic toilets for several hundred people. The inhabitants live on two hand-out meals of maize porridge a day, which is provided by local volunteers. There is no social security for them, no lifeline - any more than there was for non-whites when apartheid ruled.
According to one leading political black activist, this is the after-effect of the huge degree of selfishness and brutality which was shown towards the black population under apartheid.
I witnessed that selfishness and brutality in 1968/69 when I lived and worked in what was then South-West Africa (now Namibia) and governed by the same apartheid regime as South Africa itself.
I didn't like it and I left. Those who stayed are now feeling the backlash.
