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The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

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Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

#131

Post by alephnerd »

sangnoir wrote: post #97
boeingUH60 wrote: post #23

Earlier 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

I mean, arguably Ethiopia comes to mind with the expansion into ethnic Somali territories in the 19th century, but does invading adjacent countries and ethnic groups count as imperialism?

Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

#132

Post by kwere »

testTED wrote: post #79
oblak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Plenty of white majority countries face the same problems. Corruption, incompetence and infighting are weapons disguised to look like "human nature" while someone else is sucking your blood.

Seems like a good place to mention South Africa is running joint exercises with China and Russia.

ANC is literally a wannabe "CCP" and modeled similarly

Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

#133

Post by kwere »

gopher_space wrote: post #68
boeingUH60 wrote: post #23

Earlier 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.

Take a look at the white-majority countries that are in a similar boat. You're different from Russia only in that one global power didn't seize control of your continent a few centuries ago. From my perspective it looks like you're speed-running a continental democracy.

imperialism fucks up both the "colonizers" and "colonised" and only end up feeding an authoritarian and violent police state who doesnt care about anything that isnt "value extraction" and "keeping stability". Russia claims to be the third Rome and they are believable

Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

#134

Post by concordDance »

geraldyo wrote: post #121
concordDance wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No country has ever been unmolested during their formative years except maybe the USA.

While true that all countries had conflicts, most (maybe all?) of the developed world was never pillaged to the extent Africa and South America were. Not to mention a lot of the conflicts between those nations happened "voluntarily" between the fighting countries. Africa especially, the current country borders were designed based on the division of property between all the European countries invading the natives' lan…

Nope. Check how Frenchness came about (there used to be many languages in the current French borders). Check all the various wars (Napoleonic Wars, Finnish War, WW2, much further back we have Mongol War...).

Germany didn't exist 200 years ago.

Welsh nearly went extinct.

Poland moved hundreds of miles.

The thing that differentiates those European countries from the African ones is mostly age. And even then its not always one-sided.

There's also countries like Vietnam or empires like India which got pillaged just as hard as South Africa or Rwanda.

Also, are you trying to make the point that multi-ethnic societies result in civil war? That goes pretty strongly against current public sentiment.

Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

#135

Post by buyx »

grecy wrote: post #124
buyx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corruption, an incompetent civil service stuffed with political appointees, terrible education system, open borders (sorry, but it's a fact....you can't have huge unemployment and open borders with large numbers of undocumented people who are willing to work with no protections and below minimum wage - as per the article ), constrained electricity supply and constrained infrastructure due to a neoliberal obsession wi…

> Corruption, an incompetent civil service stuffed with political appointees, terrible education system ... constrained electricity supply and constrained infrastructure.... And what are all of those caused by? In my opinion, it's all come about because the blacks and now saying "Screw you" and "You did it to us, so we'll do it to you"... The country is not working together. And this is the result.

Blacks are the people who would suffer the worst from this attitude, since whites tend to be richer and able to buy their way out of trouble (generators, solar, batteries, private schools, private healthcare).

It may possibly have been a thing 20 years ago, but nowadays, I doubt anyone relishes the breakdown in services as "sticking it to the man".

Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

#136

Post by hulitu »

wonderwonder wrote: post #19

Was 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…

> Hiv infection rates rose from 3% to 18% of the adult population

Thanks to western Pharma companies doing "business" there.

Re: The dystopian underworld of South Africa’s illegal gold mines

#137

Post by tdeck »

luckylion wrote: post #107
tdeck wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In what corrupt country have you seen the police super active to keep random citizens from fixing issues that affect them personally?

In a country where they can benefit from pushing you around and enforcing arbitrary rules? Is it really hard to imagine corrupt police stopping a citizen from doing something that's technically illegal and benefits the citizen? That's the entire basis of their power.

> 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.

You don't know someone owns the house they're living in when you drive by. That was exactly my point.

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