Word: ance
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With its own war won, the ANC also found itself a revolutionary movement without a revolution. Not only did it have to fix the monumental inequalities that the apartheid government had created, it had to do so using the instruments of state power - government, law, the police - which it had spent years fighting. One way in which this identity crisis is expressed is in the modern ANC look - the mix of bling and camo worn by the Prada proletariat on display in East London. At a more serious level, while business, civil society and the press provide far more...
...fair, the ANC is far from the worst example of a revolutionary movement lapsed into self-enrichment and autocracy. But because South Africa is the continent's biggest economy and natural leader, the ANC is a role model and has influence beyond South Africa's borders. That's not always been a good thing. Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as President in 1999, tried to forge a middle way between revolution and democracy by calling on the ANC to embrace a "democratic revolution" in government. The approach proved schizophrenic. Mbeki the democrat adopted liberal economics, oversaw impressive growth and won plaudits...
...created millions of refugees. At the U.N., South Africa has consistently defended some of the world's worst regimes - Burma and Sudan, as well as Zimbabwe - against punitive international measures, apparently more concerned about Western bullying than the way governments treat their own people. As Feinstein says, the ANC "hasn't sent a great signal to other countries in Africa that are trying to build democracy and progress...
Problems at Home If there is one region in South Africa on which the ANC might have focused its efforts to build democracy and progress, it is the Eastern Cape around East London. Drive out of the city and after an hour you descend into a steep, forested canyon along whose floor snakes the River Kei, the old boundary between white-run South Africa and the rolling prairies which apartheid authorities designated the black "homeland" of Transkei, meaning "across the Kei." During apartheid, the Transkei was a place of destitution: thousands of mud-walled, grass-roofed huts where people lived...
Which makes it all the stranger that the ANC has done so little to improve the region. Today much of the Eastern Cape is still typified by mud-walled, grass-roofed huts without running water, where boys ride horses, girls carry babies on their backs and families subsist on cattle, sheep, goats, chickens and maize. A new power grid has reached most homes - but supply is erratic. Most roads remain unpaved. In Mthatha, 74% of the population earns less than $150 a month and 43% are unemployed, according to a June 2008 report by the South African Medical Journal...