South Africa: Part Model, Part Laboratory

After more than 40 years of segregation, the apartheid regime ended in South Africa in June 1991. Three years later, the first multiracial elections marked the start of the “post-apartheid” period in which South African society set out to change itself in such a way as to remove all trace of the past. How is this process working out, are Blacks gaining a proper place in the economy, what role is the state playing in restoring the balance? These are the kinds of questions addressed by Laurent and Daniel Bouchacourt in this article.
After describing the country’s main socio-economic features, the authors examine in detail the strategy of positive discrimination that the South African government has relied on heavily as a means of giving the Black population its rightful place in the national economy and reducing social inequality. As they stress, the two policy instruments – Black Economic Empowerment, followed by Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment – have been used in a highly pragmatic fashion, based on ways of taking immediate action, quickly challenged if they turn out not to fit the long-term aims they are supposed to achieve. And according to the authors, this pragmatism, the political maturity with which the South African government has brought the country forward, and the close intermingling of politics and economics are exemplary elements that make South Africa both a laboratory and a model, not just for developing countries, but also for industrialized nations like France that are tending to become bogged down.