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The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
101–110 of 137 posts
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered why there's no black-majority country that's prosperous...it's always the same story of corruption, incompetence, and/or infighting. Now, before anyone brings out the pitchforks, I'm a black African residing in Nigeria...I'm just saying that we really have to do better than this.
It's useful to have a long unbroken cultural history passing down a set of habits, norms and social institutions useful for highly complex large scale agricultural/industrial society. Building cultural capital is hard. That's probably the biggest factor. There's also the possibility (I don't know of much evidence either way) of differences in mental traits, not necessarily in a less intelligent sense, but in an adapt…
Brain drain is another huge factor.
If opportunities within a country are exceptionally poor, and opportunities outside are both more remunerative and reasonably accessible, talent will flee.
You see this within countries as well (generally migration from poorer / inland parts of the US toward the coasts, though housing unaffordability has somewhat put a damper on this in the past decade), but it's especially pronounced between poorer and wealthier nations of the world.
This tends also to continue to depress opportunities within poorer countries: talent migrates elsewhere, institutions tend to be less capable / more corrupt, etc. It's a vicious cycle.
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps one thing to say is that not that many countries developed in general in the last hundred years or so, depending on how you count them. It seems there isn’t really an easy path to development and many African countries started a very poor quite recently without the smoothest transition out of colonialism. You might count a few Caribbean countries for your initial question, eg the Bahamas is 90% black and has…
Devil's Advocate - in 1954, South Korea was at least as poor as most of Sub-Saharan Africa, if not poorer.
South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan were benefited hugely by becoming significant considerations within the US Cold War calculus against both the Soviet Union and China.
There was both direct engagement through defence spending and presence, as well as policy designed to specifically encourage trade relations with the US and Europe. That hit critical mass in the 1960s (Japan) and 1970s/80s (Korea).
All three regions were otherwise strongly unified culturally had had relatively little history of colonisation (arguably less so for Korea, which had in fact been occupied by Japan, than Japan or Taiwan).
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Botswana and Rwanda seems to be countries with lower levels of corruption and reasonably good or improving public services. Ghana too was doing well in the last decade, but now has taken a turn for the worse since the current government took over. I live in Ghana, and the level of corruption now, and the neglect of a proper development agenda, is unbelievable. So, I don’t think there is necessarily anything that make…
Paul Rusesabagina could not be reached for comment.
Context, for the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rusesabagina>
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#105Was a well written article. Pretty amazing contrast in the way various people are forced to live. While obviously not great for black people during apartheid South Africa's government really fell apart afterwards. Hiv infection rates rose from 3% to 18% of the adult population. Top 10 in the world for murder rates. 30% unemployment rate. Rolling blackouts. Afrikaans Paramilitary groups. Massive organized criminal org…
It's always an emigrant giving their warped perspective on how things are when they lived here years ago as a teen. The stats don't lie, but to state "Paramilitary groups, "Massive organized criminal organisations" is beyond exaggeration. South Africa (as the 31st biggest economy) has a lot of problems, but things are slowly getting better despite the wealth inequality and corruption.
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Twitter recently a Nigerian business man shared some of his frustrations which I found insightful. He started a bar. Yet later discovered that his business partner was reselling booze via the back door, pocketing this money for himself. Next, the business man started a transport business. Every driver he hired mysteriously got "robbed", which means they resold the fuel. They are just anecdotes, but if widespread,…
I gotta be honest, this post reads like "just driving by I knew how to fix all these peolles' problems but they seem too lazy to care". Is it possible there's something you don't know about each of these scenarios? It's easy to construct some self congratulatory narrative when you're visiting a poor country, but it's also a trap. In the past, these narratives tended to be biological. Now they're "cultural" but the ef…
While I like that you try to show the situation(s) may be more complex than seen at first glance (which is true for any situation anyway), the sheer number of situations should easily explain there is one or many global causes for all these.
I watch the video of a thai native going back to Thailand to make a restaurant and his experience is the same : paid the workers more to get them "committed" but they have this culture of "good enough/it's not important".
You cannot expect civilizations with millenia of divergent cultures and climate to have evolved with the same cultural/traditional habits.
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Twitter recently a Nigerian business man shared some of his frustrations which I found insightful. He started a bar. Yet later discovered that his business partner was reselling booze via the back door, pocketing this money for himself. Next, the business man started a transport business. Every driver he hired mysteriously got "robbed", which means they resold the fuel. They are just anecdotes, but if widespread,…
I gotta be honest, this post reads like "just driving by I knew how to fix all these peolles' problems but they seem too lazy to care". Is it possible there's something you don't know about each of these scenarios? It's easy to construct some self congratulatory narrative when you're visiting a poor country, but it's also a trap. In the past, these narratives tended to be biological. Now they're "cultural" but the ef…
In what corrupt country have you seen the police super active to keep random citizens from fixing issues that affect them personally? In what countries do they even have the manpower to keep someone posted on each broken piece of infrastructure to guard it and make sure that it doesn't get fixed?
It sounds like you're reaching for explanations and grasping at straws. At some point you either get to "maybe aliens did it" or you stop reaching and look for other explanations.
> There are plenty of buildings like this in SF but the reason is economic incentives, not a culture of apathy.
Yes, some things can look similar but be very much not the same. Look at the incentives, I'm sure they're not the same between a slumlord in SF and someone living in their own house.
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered why there's no black-majority country that's prosperous...it's always the same story of corruption, incompetence, and/or infighting. Now, before anyone brings out the pitchforks, I'm a black African residing in Nigeria...I'm just saying that we really have to do better than this.
How many black-majority countries were or are imperialist? External Imperialism does wonders for the prosperity of the home country. I ought to ask this on /r/AskHistorians
> External Imperialism does wonders for the prosperity of the home country.
Does it last though? The UK doesn't seem to be bursting at the seams with prosperity these days. Switzerland does much better yet never had any colonies. Portugal had lots, just as Spain, and look at them. Germany had few because they started late and they're doing much better. The Ottoman empire was huge but Turkey isn't doing too good, despite its strategic geopolitical location that pays lots of dividend.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but does lack of correlation?
And yes, of course there were African empires, but they didn't nicely map to countries (but then again, did European empires? The Habsburgers would say otherwise) and didn't leave a lasting imprint of prosperity.
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered why there's no black-majority country that's prosperous...it's always the same story of corruption, incompetence, and/or infighting. Now, before anyone brings out the pitchforks, I'm a black African residing in Nigeria...I'm just saying that we really have to do better than this.
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This is such a "history started in 1900" take, it's weird that people love to publicly display their ignorance.
Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely rape has to far more than about twice as common as murder? Looking at US stats the homicide rate is 0.007% and sexual assault 0.1% per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States
Why didn't you just look up the SA stats instead?
I did [1], 2015-2016 saw 51895 reported "crimes of sexual nature". There seems to be a giant amount of unreported rapes though: While women's groups in South Africa estimate that a woman is raped every 26 seconds, the South African police estimates that a woman is raped every 36 seconds and In 1998, one in three of the 4,000 women questioned in Johannesburg had been raped, according to Community Information, Empowerment and Transparency (CIET) Africa and It is estimated that over 40% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime and that only 1 in 9 rapes are reported. draw a drastic image.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_South_Afric...