Things Go South

“This month, South Africa witnessed the worst violence since the end of the apartheid era. More than three hundred and thirty died over a week of escalating tensions. Forty thousand businesses—including stores, banks, factories, and post offices—were vandalized or burned; damage to the economy was estimated in the billions of dollars.” The spark was the imprisonment of corrupt former President Jacob Zuma. But the rot beneath the riots runs deeper than that, and some of it will seem familiar. Robin Wright in The New Yorker: Mandela’s Dream for South Africa Is in Ruins.