Trip to South Africa

South Africa Safari

In the winter of 2006 New York City was hit with a slew of snowstorms – which made it easy to schedule a luxury vacation to South Africa. The first couple of days were spent on safari at Gomo Gomo Game Lodge in Kruger National Park. Below are a couple of smiling lions. To view more images of animals in the wild click here.

Ten Years of Freedom

On April 27, 1994 the South African population voted for the first free general election making Nelson Mandela its official President. The date is now a celebrated as a national holiday, Freedom Day, a day that acknowledges the end of apartheid (the system in which South Africans were legally classified into a racial group and were geographically, and forcibly, separated from each other).

More than 10 years later many of the inequalities still exist between social classes and color lines. A United Nations Development Program study reports that in 2002 approximately 60% of the population earned less than R42,000 per year (about US$7,000), whereas 2.2% of the population had an income exceeding R360,000 per year (about US$50,000). Blacks made up over 90% of those living in poverty.

Here is picture of from my trip in 2006 to Stellenbosch, a college town outside of Capetown.

On the other side of the train tracks (a five minute walk) is a township, the term used to refer to the (often underdeveloped) urban residential areas that, under apartheid, were reserved for non-whites who lived near or worked in areas that were designated “white-only” and still exist today.

Black Economic Empowerment Legislation

Similar to America’s Affirmative Action legislation, South Africa established the controversial Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation in 1993 to create a “majority rule” policy in both public and private sectors by setting quotas which has come under harsh critisism from both whites and blacks. At a lecture in Johannesburg in 2002, Archbishop Desmond Tutu attacked the policy claiming that attempts to boost black economic ownership were only benefiting an elite minority.

In response to the BEE, the government launched the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment legislation in 2004 which it hopes will distribute wealth across as broad a spectrum of South African society as possible. At the time of this posting there was no definitive information available to show the effects of the revised policy.