Word: apartheid
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...expected to win a fourth consecutive term in South Africa's parliamentary and presidential elections on April 22. But for the first time since it came to power with the end of apartheid in 1994, that result is not guaranteed, and by any measure - popularity, membership, moral authority - the party is in decline. Its leaders are embroiled in a series of scandals involving both corruption and ineptitude. As a government, it has failed to stem raging violent crime and the world's largest HIV/AIDS epidemic. It has presided over an economic boom that has made millionaires of a well-connected...
...Struggle The decline of the ANC is all the more dramatic considering the moral heights it once occupied. In the years it was fighting apartheid, its mission was clear and its righteousness unassailable. ANC members were freedom fighters repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white...
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...
...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 without running water, electricity and roads. Apartheid's rulers absolved themselves of any blame for this poverty by arguing that blacks...
...This is not a happy town." An hour away in the village of Mvezo, where Mandela was born 90 years ago into a small gathering of huts on a narrow, windswept spur, the Mandelas' immediate neighbors are outspoken about their disillusionment with the ANC. "My life was better during apartheid," says Vincent Ntswayi, 53, who held a steady job in Johannesburg during white rule but has only been intermittently employed since. "Freedom turned out to be just a word. Real freedom, real power, that comes from money - and I haven't got any money...