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The first thing that has to be said is that we are not just talking about a single country a long way off. What is sobering and startling in South Africa is the realization that it is a sort of caricature of the whole of our world— ‘like everywhere else, only more so’. The world in focus, perhaps: because here you see the proximity of lavish overconsumption and starvation, freedom and slavery, massive military investment and plain human need. Here you can see the link between our wealth and their poverty. A few of the intermediate stages that usually cushion us from this realization are missing, so that poverty appears in its naked causal connection with the aggressive greed of a minority. It is impossible there not to see poverty as what is created by the violence of the few against the many in a situation of a great natural wealth of resources. In some of the so-called native ‘homelands’ in South Africa, where populations are forcibly shifted from their existing locations, something between one-fifth and one-third of black children die before they are five years old. They do not die by accident, though they die of ‘natural’ causes: they die because decisions have been taken which mean that they are exposed to disease and malnutrition endemic in these areas, far from real medical care. They die because of Dr. Piet Koornhof, the astonishingly titled Minister for Co-operation and Development. That will sound shocking; though the real shock is to grasp that children there and elsewhere in Africa or in Asia or Central America also die because of us, because of the electors of our governments.
