Originally Posted by Telegraph
Last year, 34 black striking miners were gunned down by South African police at the Lonmin mine in Marikana. Some were shot in the back as they attempted to flee. Some were killed as they surrendered. Others were killed 300 metres from where the main massacre took place, suggesting they had been chased – that is, hunted down – by the armed servants of the ANC. Yet there was no outrage in the Western liberal press. There were no fuming leaders; very few angry columns. Amnesty International, guardian of the modern liberal conscience, issued a weak, almost uninterested statement about this act of mass murder, and then went back to throwing money and staff at the campaign to have ***** Riot – prettier and way more fashionable than those dead miners – freed from jail in Russia.
This month, a pretty white woman, Reeva Steenkamp, was killed by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, in a gated community in South Africa. And this time, right-thinking observers went crazy. The shock and outrage have been palpable. Feminists have popularised the Twitter hashtag #hernamewasReevaSteenkamp, to draw attention to the scourge of domestic violence in South Africa. Column after column tells us that the Steenkamp killing shows that the New South Africa is sick, that it's a fear-ruled, crime-ridden, corrupt nation. This tragic shooting and the fractured court case and debate it has given rise to have cast a "lurid light" on South Africa, commentators tell us, calling into question its image as a "Rainbow Nation". Where the massacre of 34 black workers elicited a collective shrug of the shoulder among observers over here, the killing of Steenkamp has got them tearing their hair out, demanding answers, wondering what the hell went wrong with the country they once admired (the New South Africa) and its ruling party that they once cheered (the ANC).
All of which raises a very awkward question: why is the shooting of a white woman in a domestic setting more shocking to liberal commentators than the massacre of 34 black miners at a public strike and demonstration? This isn't a complaint about how the media elevates celebrity news over all other forms of news. I can understand why there is so much media and public interest in the Pistorius/Steenkamp case: it isn't every day a global sports star shoots his famous, beautiful girlfriend in questionable circumstances. But what is striking is the fact that it took this incident – and not, say, the ANC's massacre of 34 miners – to open Western liberals' eyes to the profound problems, the moral and political decay, in modern-day South Africa.
To the critical observer, it should have been clear for years that this so-called Rainbow Nation, born of the end of Apartheid and the election of the ANC in 1994, is a dark, unpleasant place. The unhinged police assault on those striking miners last year was only the most graphic manifestation of the ANC's creation of an even more unequal, unpredictable society than that which existed under the racist rulers of the Apartheid era. As a Yale University study found recently, in the New South Africa "income inequality has probably grown". Certainly life expectancy – that basic measure of a nation's fortunes – has declined in the New South Africa, falling from 62 years in 1990 to a truly depressing 49 years in 2012. Life for most blacks in ANC-ruled South Africa (not those blacks who were on the ANC's gravy train to power, of course) is harsh, unequal, brutish and short; and as those miners learned last year, anyone who fights back against the new system risks being mown down by the cops. It is not surprising that such living conditions, that the glaringly unrealised hopes of the post-Apartheid era, have nurtured much fear and violence in the New South Africa.
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