Sex Trafficking in South Africa: World Cup Slavery Fear

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A teenage girl waits near a hotel in Bloemfontein

Melanie Hamman

By E. Benjamin Skinner

For a South African victim of human trafficking, this was the endgame. On a freezing night last July, Sindiswa, 17, lay curled in a fetal position in bed No. 7 of a state-run hospice in central Bloemfontein. Well-used fly strips hung between fluorescent lights, pale blue paint flaked off the walls, and fresh blood stained her sheets, the rusty bedpost and the linoleum floor. Sindiswa had full-blown AIDS and tuberculosis, and she was three months pregnant. Sweat poured from her forehead as she whispered her story through parched lips covered with sores. A few blocks away, the roars of rugby fans erupted from Free State Stadium. In June the roars will be from fans of the World Cup. (See pictures of South Africa.)

Sindiswa's family was one of the poorest families in Indwe, the poorest district in Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces in South Africa. Ninety-five percent of the residents of her township fall below the poverty line, more than a quarter have HIV, and most survive by clinging to government grants. Orphaned at 16, she had to leave school to support herself. Last February, a woman from a neighboring town offered to find work for her and her 15-year-old best friend, Elizabeth, who, like Sindiswa, was poor but was also desperate to escape her violent older sister. (I have changed Elizabeth's name to protect her identity.)

After driving them eight hours north to Bloemfontein, the recruiter sold them to a Nigerian drug and human-trafficking syndicate in exchange for $120 and crack cocaine. "[The recruiter] said we could find a job," Sindiswa recalled, "but as soon as we got here, she told us, 'No. You have to go into the streets and sell yourselves.' " The buyer, Jude, forced them into prostitution on the streets of central Bloemfontein for 12 straight hours every night. Each morning, he collected their earnings — Sindiswa averaged $40 per night; Elizabeth, $65. Elizabeth tried to escape three times, once absconding for several weeks. Jude always found her or used Sindiswa as a hostage to lure her back, then enlisted an enforcer named Rasta to beat her. (See pictures of violence in South Africa.)

It is unclear if Sindiswa contracted HIV before or after she was sold, but some of her clients didn't use condoms. She was diagnosed with the virus only a week before I met her. When she was too sick to stand and thus useless as a slave, Jude had thrown her onto the street. Nurses expected her to die within days.

Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. Slaves are those forced to perform services for no pay beyond subsistence and for the profit of others who hold them through fraud and violence. While most are held in debt bondage in the poorest regions of South Asia, some are trafficked in the midst of thriving development. Such is the case here in Africa's wealthiest country, the host of this year's World Cup. While South Africa invests billions to prepare its infrastructure for the half-million visitors expected to attend, tens of thousands of children have become ensnared in sexual slavery, and those who profit from their abuse are also preparing for the tournament. During a three-week investigation into human-trafficking syndicates operating near two stadiums, I found a lucrative trade in child sex. The children, sold for as little as $45, can earn more than $600 per night for their captors. "I'm really looking forward to doing more business during the World Cup," said a trafficker. We were speaking at his base overlooking Port Elizabeth's new Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium. Already, he had done brisk business among the stadium's construction workers.

Although its 1996 constitution expressly forbids slavery, South Africa has no stand-alone law against human trafficking in all its forms. Aid groups estimate that some 38,000 children are trapped in the sex trade there. More than 500 mostly small-scale trafficking syndicates — Nigerian, Chinese, Indian and Russian, among others — collude with South African partners, including recruiters and corrupt police officials, to enslave local victims. The country's estimated 1.4 million AIDS orphans are especially vulnerable. South Africa has more HIV cases than any other nation, and a child sold into its sex industry will often face an early grave.

As Sindiswa told me her story, her voice trailed off, and the man who brought me to her — Andre Lombard, 39, a pastor of the Christian Revival Church — laid his hands on her. Lombard had a penetrating gaze and a simmering rage toward men who abuse women. His father, a brutal drunkard, had beaten his mother regularly. Lombard became a born-again Christian at age 17, then served in South Africa's élite special forces for 11 years. (See 25 people who mattered in 2009.)

He began a street ministry in April 2006 and recruited some 60 volunteers to distribute food, blankets and Bibles to the dozens of women and girls selling sex within a 10-block radius of the stadium. They also preached to clients and traffickers. Fights were commonplace. Lombard allowed his volunteers to carry firearms, and several wound up in the intensive-care unit of the local hospital. Lombard acknowledges that most of the prostitutes were not enslaved. Still, in a controversial move, he purchased bus tickets home for more than two dozen women as a way to "escape the streets." With no comprehensive rehabilitation, however, several wound up back in prostitution. Mainstream antitrafficking organizations often decry such tactics as reckless. In response, Lombard says, "I'm a goer. If you drive by and just talk about it and don't do anything, you're actually justifying it."

After we left the hospice, Lombard drove eight blocks east of the stadium to the notorious Maitland Hotel. Police had identified the Maitland as a base of drug- and human-trafficking operations. HIV-positive survivors described how traffickers used gang rape, drug provision, sleep deprivation and torture to "break" new children on the fifth floor; the fourth floor featured an illegal abortion clinic. On other floors, as many as four girls slept on a single mattress. Police raided the Maitland in 2008 and shut the place down last January. Traffickers had been tipped off about the final raid, yet officials still rescued dozens of underage girls and seized weapons and thousands of dollars' worth of drugs. Though still officially closed, the Maitland was active. Next door, a club blasted music by Tupac, and several girls worked the front of the hotel, where a makeshift concierge took rents. (See TIME's tribute to people who passed away in 2009.)

A shivering girl in a red sweatshirt and flip-flops stood alone at the corner of the hotel. She said she was 15 and desperately needed help. I asked Lombard's volunteer to translate from Xhosa. Shockingly, this was Elizabeth — Sindiswa's best friend — still controlled by Jude. Having researched modern-day slavery for eight years, I knew how difficult it was for survivors to heal after emancipation. In this case, mere emancipation would be a dangerous procedure.

Earlier that day, I spoke with Luis CdeBaca, who was visiting South Africa on his first foreign visit as President Obama's ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat human trafficking. "Dedicated cops, prosecutors and victim advocates are fighting the traffickers in several host cities, but they're largely doing it on their own," he said. Obama has pledged to make the fight to abolish modern-day slavery a top foreign policy priority, but the U.S. currently spends more in a single day fighting drug trafficking than it does in an entire year fighting human trafficking. So CdeBaca, whose office evaluates every country based on its efforts to fight human bondage, must rely largely on diplomatic pressure. "An exploitation-free World Cup will require resources and political will from the South African government and the international community alike," said CdeBaca.

Such political will is not evident. At best, the South African government's response to child sex trafficking has been superficial or piecemeal; at worst, some officials have actually colluded with the traffickers. American and South African law-enforcement sources described how police at all levels have solicited underage prostitutes in Bloemfontein, Durban and other World Cup cities. South African officials claim that Parliament will pass a comprehensive law against human trafficking in early 2010. For now, enterprising police officers who take on human traffickers do so with few legal tools at their disposal. Convictions for trafficking-related offenses typically bring little or no jail time. And those vigilante humanitarians like Lombard face an emboldened and violent adversary, as I saw that evening. (See TIME's South Africa covers.)

Elizabeth insisted that we recover her scant possessions: a handful of clothes and a Bible. Jude had convinced her that he would perform witchcraft on those items, to track and punish her if she again attempted escape. We drove to Jude's fortified crack den five minutes away. Lombard and I followed Elizabeth into the darkness behind the compound. We were joined by Shadrack, a kung-fu-trained church volunteer who worked as a financial adviser by day. Elizabeth tapped a secret knock, and after Jude ushered her in, Shadrack wedged his foot in the door. We pushed into the dingy flat, which bore the medicinal odor of crack. As the churchmen escorted Elizabeth to retrieve her clothes, I smiled and feigned ignorance of their intent. While Lombard and Elizabeth retrieved her possessions, I spoke to Jude alone. Short and muscular, with dark, patchy skin, Jude wore slim, brown corduroys and white Crocs with green dollar signs. Jude explained that he lured girls from Johannesburg, where many survive by "picking through garbage." Our conversation turned to soccer. I asked him if he was looking forward to the World Cup. "Yeah, this is good! Us people are going to make a lot of money then if you know what you're doing." (See pictures of Johannesburg preparing for the World Cup.)

As I prepared to leave, a woman began screaming from a sealed-off room in the compound. Lombard burst back into the room and forced his way to the darkened recesses of the compound. He kicked in a door to find Rasta, the syndicate's enforcer, half naked with the screaming woman, who ran behind Lombard. "Did you beat her? Because if you beat her, you must beat me," Lombard said, inches from the flaring eyes of the muscular Rasta. Rasta launched a haymaker at Lombard, who ducked. Rasta threatened to call in his "brothers." "I'll break their legs too," Lombard retorted as we retreated to our car, where the photographer traveling with us, Melanie Hamman, was bent in prayer with Elizabeth. With Jude chasing us on foot, we drove off.

Newly elected South African President Jacob Zuma addressed fears about sex trafficking in a speech last August. "We have noted the concern amongst women's groups that the 2010 FIFA World Cup may have the unintended consequence of creating opportunities for human trafficking," the President said. "We are putting systems in place to prevent this, as part of general security measures that we should take when hosting an event of this magnitude."

Zuma's pledge was too little, too late for Sindiswa, who died on July 22. Immediately after we took Elizabeth off the streets, Hamman and I drove her eight hours to her home in Eastern Cape. Wary of the failure rate of Lombard's unmonitored returns, we worked with a dedicated social worker in Indwe to ensure that the conditions under which she was originally trafficked did not reappear. A suburban-Chicago couple has given her a full scholarship, enabling the otherwise impossible goal of finishing school. She is HIV-negative. It is a stretch to call her lucky. But she has another chance at life.

Skinner is the author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (Free Press, 2008), which was awarded the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction. This investigation was supported by a grant from Humanity United.

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Holiday of White Conquest Persists in South Africa

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By BARRY BEARAK

PRETORIA, South Africa — The 16th of December was once a day of rival holidays here, two opposing flows of memory colliding at a junction.

Afrikaners, the descendants of white settlers, celebrated the Day of the Vow, a covenant said to be made between their ancestors and God in 1838 that led to the slaughter of 3,000 Zulus. Blacks commemorated the same day on the calendar, marking the start of armed struggle against the apartheid regime by the African National Congress in 1961.

With the arrival of multiracial democracy in 1994, lawmakers considered it wise to maintain Dec. 16 as a holiday, proclaiming it a Day of Reconciliation, a time for all races to come together in the spirit of national unity.

But 15 years later, that happily-ever-after ending is a long way off, and the ideal of a rainbow nation now seems little more than a deft turn of phrase. According to a poll released last week by the highly regarded Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 31 percent of South Africans believe that race relations have not improved since the end of apartheid, and 16 percent actually think they have gotten worse. (About 50 percent said relations had improved.)

As for the holiday itself, most Afrikaners have found it hard to set aside one of their most sacred occasions, and on Wednesday, thousands of them gathered, as they do every year, inside the marble chamber of a mammoth granite monument near Pretoria. The structure is a shrine to the Great Trek, when white pioneers migrated north with their ox-drawn wagons and ramrod-loading muskets, completing a conquest they saw as the fulfillment of a divine mission.

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“The Day of Reconciliation may be a good idea, but for Afrikaners, the Day of the Vow is still what’s in our hearts,” said Johan de Beer, 46, a teacher waiting on the steps for the gates of the monument to open in the early morning. “This is a religious holiday that is based on our people’s history.”

In his inauguration address, Nelson Mandela spoke of a covenant of his own, longing for “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” Viewers of the new American movie “Invictus” might be tempted to conclude that such racial harmony prevailed in the aftermath of a long-shot upset in a rugby game.

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The recent survey results would probably stun someone who went to sleep during apartheid and awakened in the present. After all, blacks not only control the government, they mingle in the finest restaurants and swankiest malls. The so-called black diamonds include liberation struggle heroes who have been welcomed into the boardrooms of the nation’s largest corporations.

But while South Africa is the continent’s wealthiest country, income inequality here remains among the worst in the world. About 29 percent of blacks are unemployed, compared with 5 percent of whites, according to recent figures. When statistics include discouraged workers — dropouts from the labor force — the jobless rate climbs to nearly 50 percent. Most of the unemployed have never held a single job, according to a study by a panel of international economists.

The recent poll results also showed that nearly one in four South Africans never speaks to people of other races in a typical day. “In the upper income groups there is a lot of integration, but very little among the poor,” said Fanie du Toit, the executive director of the institute that released the poll. “About 40 to 50 percent of blacks are slum dwellers or rural people who never come in contact with whites.”

At the Voortrekker Monument, among those celebrating the Day of the Vow, barely a black person was in sight but for the men in blue uniforms picking up the trash. “I don’t know anything about their holiday,” said one of those workers, Elias Selema.

The earliest attendees took seats beneath the monument’s dome in the main hall, a huge room encircled by friezes made from Italian marble that depict the epic migration. Others sat a level below, surrounding the cenotaph, the empty tomb that is the symbolic resting place of those who died during the trek. Still more took seats on the surrounding lawns and in the gardens.

“This is my day of thanksgiving,” said Callie van Merwe, an 89-year-old woman dressed in the loose frock and white cotton bonnet of a settler. She added: “Today is a happy time, but I feel bad about the future. This country is changing, changing too much.”

There are several versions of the Day of the Vow and the Battle of Blood River that followed. The historical record is one-sided, and no doubt the retellings lend themselves to myth. One historian, Leonard Thompson, has said the mythology came to serve a political purpose, used to justify the racial oppression of apartheid as God’s will.

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In the story’s most common rendition, a brigade of 468 voortrekkers, or pioneers, and about 60 of their slaves set out to avenge hundreds of deaths at the hands of the Zulus. Their leader, Andries Pretorius, cleverly selected a place to camp that was protected by a steep ravine and the Ncome River, which broadened at that spot into a deep hippopotamus pool.

Preceding the Zulu attack that was sure to come, the trekkers came together to recite a vow. In part it read, “If he will protect us and give our enemy into our hand, we shall keep this day and date every year as a day of thanksgiving like a Sabbath, and that we shall erect a church in his honor.”

The Afrikaners chained their covered wagons together, placing barbed shrubs beneath them. Wave after wave of Zulus charged, trying to use their short spears in close combat, but instead dying in heaps as smoke rose from muskets and cannons. As the story goes, 3,000 Zulus died while the trekkers suffered only three injuries. So many warriors fell dead in the Ncome it then became known as Blood River.

“We believe it was God’s will to have Christians lead the way in this land,” said Lukas de Kock, one of the leaders of Wednesday’s worship. “On that day, the Day of the Vow, God made a clear statement that this was his will for South Africa.”

The reading of the vow is one of the two most solemn moments of the prayer service. The other comes precisely at midday as families lean over the parapets that overlook the cenotaph.

Careful calculations were made by the monument’s designers, and exactly at noon on each Dec. 16, the sun shines through a small opening in the dome, alighting on the empty tomb 138 feet below and yet again signaling for many that it was the Lord’s will that the land be theirs.

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Eager Students Fall Prey to Apartheid’s Legacy - NYTimes.com

Image by JP-Flanigan via Flickr

By CELIA W. DUGGER

KHAYELITSHA, South Africa — Seniors here at Kwamfundo high school sang freedom songs and protested outside the staff room last year because their accounting teacher chronically failed to show up for class. With looming national examinations that would determine whether they were bound for a university or joblessness, they demanded a replacement.

“We kept waiting, and there was no action,” said Masixole Mabetshe, who failed the exams and who now, out of work, passes the days watching TV.

The principal of the school, Mongezeleli Bonani, said in an interview that there was little he could do beyond giving the teacher a warning. Finally the students’ frustration turned riotous. They threw bricks, punched two teachers and stabbed one in the head with scissors, witnesses said.

The traumatized school’s passing rate on the national exams known as the matric — already in virtual free fall — tumbled to just 44 percent.

Thousands of schools across South Africa are bursting with students who dream of being the accountants, engineers and doctors this country desperately needs, but the education system is often failing the very children depending on it most to escape poverty.

Post-apartheid South Africa is at grave risk of producing what one veteran commentator has called another lost generation, entrenching the racial and class divide rather than bridging it. Half the students never make it to 12th grade. Many who finish at rural and township schools are so ill educated that they qualify for little but menial labor or the ranks of the jobless, fueling the nation’s daunting rates of unemployment and crime.

“If you are in a township school, you don’t have much chance,” said Graeme Bloch, an education researcher at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. “That’s the hidden curriculum — that inequality continues, that white kids do reasonably and black kids don’t really stand a chance unless they can get into a formerly white school or the small number of black schools that work.”

South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma, bluntly stated that the “wonderful policies” of the government led by his party, the African National Congress, since the end of apartheid 15 years ago, “have not essentially led to the delivery of quality education for the poorest of the poor.”

Scoring at Bottom

Despite sharp increases in education spending since apartheid ended, South African children consistently score at or near rock bottom on international achievement tests, even measured against far poorer African countries. This bodes ill for South Africa’s ability to compete in a globalized economy, or to fill its yawning demand for skilled workers.

And the wrenching achievement gap between black and white students persists. Here in the Western Cape, only 2 out of 1,000 sixth graders in predominantly black schools passed a mathematics test at grade level in 2005, compared with almost 2 out of 3 children in schools once reserved for whites that are now integrated, but generally in more affluent neighborhoods.

“If you say 3 times 3, they will say 6,” said Patrine Makhele, a math teacher at Kwamfundo here in this overwhelmingly black township, echoing the complaint of colleagues who say children get to high school not knowing their multiplication tables.

South Africa’s schools are still struggling with the legacy of the apartheid era, when the government established a separate “Bantu” education system that deliberately sought to make blacks subservient laborers. Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister who was the architect of apartheid, said “Bantu” must not be subjected to an education that shows him “the green pastures of European society in which he was not allowed to graze.”

The struggle against apartheid dismantled the discredited structures of authority in education that Mr. Zuma’s government is now seeking to replace with a new approach to accountability. In those years, the African National Congress sought to make the nation — and its schools — ungovernable. Supervisors — part of an “inspectorate” that enforced a repressive order — were chased out of the schools, as were many principals.

Mary Metcalfe, who was the A.N.C.’s first post-apartheid education minister in the province that includes Johannesburg, recalled principals in Soweto being forcibly marched out of the township. After apartheid ended, Ms. Metcalfe, recently appointed director general in the country’s Higher Education Ministry, said there was a grab for “power and jobs and money.”

Most teachers in South Africa’s schools today got inferior educations under the Bantu system, and this has seriously impaired their ability to teach the next generation, analysts say. Teachers are not tested on subject knowledge, but one study of third-grade teachers’ literacy, for example, found that the majority of them scored less than 50 percent on a test for sixth graders.

But South Africa’s schools also have problems for which history cannot be blamed, including teacher absenteeism, researchers say. And then when teachers are in school, they spend too little time on instruction. A survey found that they taught for a little over three hours a day, rather than the five expected, with paperwork consuming too many hours. Mr. Zuma noted that this deficiency was worse in poor and working-class communities.

“We must ask ourselves to what extent teachers in many historically disadvantaged schools unwittingly perpetuate the wishes of Hendrik Verwoerd,” he recently told a gathering of principals, implicitly challenging the powerful South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, which is part of the governing alliance.

As South Africa has invested heavily in making the system fairer, the governing party made some serious mistakes, experts say. The new curriculum was overly sophisticated and complex. Teacher colleges were closed down, without adequate alternatives. The teachers’ union too often protected its members at the expense of pupils, critics say.

“We have the highest level of teacher unionization in the world, but their focus is on rights, not responsibilities,” Mamphela Ramphele, former vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said in a recent speech.

South Africa’s new education minister, Angie Motshekga, said in an interview that a lack of accountability had weakened the whole system.

“There’s a complete breakdown,” said Ms. Motshekga, a former high school history teacher.

Teacher vacancies commonly go unfilled for months, she said. Principals cannot select the teachers in their schools or discipline them for absenteeism.

Ms. Motshekga said she had Mr. Zuma’s strong backing to give principals greater authority, and would also seek to change the law so the education department could pick principals directly — and hold them accountable.

“The president said to me, ‘Minister, immediately look at the powers of principals,’ ” she said.

Here in the Western Cape, where the opposition Democratic Alliance recently came to power, the province is considering monitoring teachers’ attendance by having them send text messages or e-mail messages — in response to an electronic query — to confirm they are present.

“We’ve got to get discipline back in schools,” said Donald Grant, the provincial education minister.

Discipline for Teachers

Kwamfundo Secondary School illustrates just how critical an effective principal and disciplined teachers are to student achievement — and how quickly a school’s success can crumble if they are lacking.

For much of this decade, Kwamfundo was led by Luvuyo Ngubelanga, a commanding man admired by students and teachers alike for his strict insistence on punctuality, his work ethic and his faith in them. He prowled the corridors of the yellow brick school, poking his head in classrooms and collaring misbehaving students, making them pick up litter, sweep the halls or clean the bathrooms.

Mr. Ngubelanga, who now runs a vocational college, said most teachers are dedicated, but some could “be naughty like kids.” He recalled finding a classroom packed with students and tracking down its AWOL teacher loafing at the back of another class.

In his years as principal, 75 to 82 percent of students passed the matric, a set of examinations given to seniors that shape their life chances. But the school has struggled since he was succeeded by his deputy, Mr. Bonani. The matric passing rate plunged to 65 percent in 2007 and 44 percent last year.

Teachers and students describe Mr. Bonani as a far less forceful presence, though he says he is engaged and active. Teacher absenteeism has been a major problem.

“There’s a lot of teachers who take sick leave,” said one teacher, who asked not to be named, as it would jeopardize his ability to work with colleagues. “They are not punctual in the morning. How do we expect learners to behave if we do not behave?”

Hungry for Knowledge

Despite last year’s violent episode, students seem to feel genuine affection for their school and speak of their hunger for knowledge and their faith in education to bring a better life.

The classroom itself, No. 12A, seemed shaken awake one recent first period as 52 seniors lifted their voices in harmony. Tall, lanky young men at the back of the room pounded out a driving beat on their backpacks in a morning ritual of song and rhythm.

Even when they realized the science teacher was absent, the student body president and his sidekick, a radiantly optimistic AIDS orphan, rose to lead a review session on evolution. And when the second-period English teacher was late, they just kept on talking about Darwin’s finches and genetic mutations.

“Quiet!” exclaimed Olwethu Thwalintini, 18, the student leader. “Can I have your attention, please. Exercise 2.1.”

Murmuring voices and shuffling papers fell silent.

“List two environmental factors which make it possible for the vertebrates to move onto land,” said Blondie Mangco, 17, the sidekick, whose mother died during final exams last year.

Blondie has barely passing grades in physical science, but she believes she will somehow raise them to A’s or B’s, win entrance to the university of her dreams and become an environmentalist, a doctor or a biomedical scientist. Now that her parents and big sister are dead of AIDS, she feels a duty to be a role model to her little brother.

“He’s looking up to me now,” she said.

Later that day, Arthur Mgqweto, a math teacher, strode into the classroom, jauntily wearing a township take on the fedora called a square. He teaches more than 200 students each day for a salary of $15,000 a year. His students describe him as a friend, a mother, a father, a guide.

“He comes early every, every, every day,” Blondie said. “He comes here early at 7 o’clock and he’s the last one to leave. He’s given himself to us.”

Mr. Mgqweto grew up in the countryside during the apartheid years, ashamed to go to school because he had no shoes. He finished high school in his 30s, sitting in class with children half his age. His only son was stabbed to death at age 21 in a nearby township.

“I always explain to them, life is very hard,” he said. “They must get educated so they can take care of their families when they grow old.”

His students bake chocolate cakes with him on their birthdays. Dozens come an hour early on weekdays and for Saturday morning sessions with him. He is paid nothing for those extra hours, except in their gratitude.

“I love that teacher,” said Olwethu, the student leader. “I love him.”

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South Africa’s Poor Demand Basic Services - NYTimes.com

By BARRY BEARAK

SIYATHEMBA, South Africa — This country’s rituals of protest most often call for the burning of tires, the barricading of streets and the throwing of rocks. So when the municipal mayor here went to address the crowd after three days of such agitation, the police thought it best to take him into the stadium in a blast-resistant armored vehicle.

Chastened by the continuing turmoil, the mayor, Mabalane Tsotetsi, known as Lefty, penitently explained that all of the protesters’ complaints would be given his full attention. But by then official promises were a deflated currency, and rocks and bottles were again flying as he retreated.

The reasons for this community’s wrath — unleashed first in late July and again briefly a month later — were ruefully familiar to many South Africans. “Water, electricity, unemployment: nothing has gotten better,” said Lifu Nhlapo, 26, a leader of the protests here in Siyathemba, a township 50 miles east of Johannesburg. “We feel an anger, and when we are ignored, what else is there to do but take to the streets?”

Civil unrest among this nation’s poor has recently gotten worldwide attention, and is often portrayed as unhappiness with South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma. Actually, these so-called service delivery protests have gone on with regularity for a long time. They vary in intensity — mild, medium and hot — and their frequency seems to rise and fall without a predictable pattern.

Oddly enough, the protests can be seen as a measure of progress as well as frustration. Since the arrival of democracy 15 years ago, the percentages of households with access to piped water, a flush toilet or a connection to the power grid have notably increased. Those people left waiting are often angry, and so far their ire has not usually been directed at the president — who has been able to use the protests to his political advantage — but at municipal officials they consider uncaring, incompetent and corrupt.

“No one wants to be worse off than their neighbor,” said Kevin Allan, managing director of Municipal IQ, a company that monitors the performance of local government. “People get impatient.”

The places most ripe for unrest are neither the poorest communities nor those with the longest backlog in setting up services, he said. Most commonly, the protests are rooted in informal settlements that have sprung up near urban areas, where the poor who do not receive government services rub up against the poor who do.

Whatever the causes for the protests, the governing African National Congress appears to take them quite seriously. Party leaders have been dispatched to hot spots, where they usually end up investigating their fellow party members. Local government, like national government, is largely dominated by the A.N.C.

In Siyathemba, the emissary from on high was Mr. Zuma himself. On the afternoon of Aug. 4, his helicopter set down on a rocky soccer field, with bodyguards and a BMW waiting. He eventually proceeded to the town of Balfour, the seat of municipal government. Mayor Tsotetsi, at home at the time, rushed back to the office to meet his unannounced visitor. Commentators had a good laugh about that, presuming the mayor a goldbrick who likes to knock off early.

“There is no place that will be hidden from me,” Mr. Zuma announced, leaving the impression he was now a sort of caped superhero who would pop up wherever malingerers were not earning their government paychecks.

Though the president also denounced lawbreaking by protesters, his visit seemed an endorsement to those here who had vented their anger. “Zuma agrees with us, that all these mayors and councilors who are not performing have to go,” said Zakhele Maya, 26, another leader of the demonstrations.

Siyathemba has a population of about 6,000 and an unemployment rate of 82 percent, more than triple the nation’s rate, according to official statistics. Most here live in shacks of corrugated metal, the roofs kept in place with strategically placed rocks. Many of the dwellings sag in the middle as if they were melting in the hot sun.

Clusters of shacks here look about the same, but some are settlements that have been “formalized,” which means that the hovels, however dilapidated, have electricity inside and a water tap and flush toilet nearby. Those people living in communities without this imprimatur must light their homes with kerosene or paraffin and wait in lines, pail in hand, at a single communal spigot.

“This is no way to live,” said Mercy Mbiza, 38. “We have to dig a pit for a toilet, and when it’s full, we dig another. They tell us we are on a waiting list to get services. Whether I will die first, I don’t know.”

Rumors — true or not — are dangerous combustibles in places like this. People are suspicious that money meant for them is being stolen or wasted by the big shots in Balfour. Some goings-on simply make no sense.

For instance, Arlene Moloi’s house has four pillars and a roof and only emptiness in between. The municipality paid someone to construct it in 1996, but the builder suddenly disappeared after starting the job.

“The officials tell me they are waiting for the same man to come back and finish,” said Ms. Moloi, a 54-year-old widow. “But it already has been 13 years.”

The Siyathemba protests began with a meeting of disgruntled young people, some of them members of political youth groups, others players on sports teams. They compiled a list of their many grievances. They wanted more water and electricity, yes. But they also wanted better roads, a local hospital and a police station. Beyond that, they wanted jobs.

This list of demands was left at the municipal hall in Balfour. “Some of these things — hospitals, police stations — these are matters to take up at the provincial level,” said the municipality’s spokesman, Mohlalefi Lebotha. “Where is the money for these things, not just to construct them but to sustain them?”

At first, Mr. Tsotetsi did not meet with the disgruntled. Nor did he call a special session of the municipal council as the protesters had demanded.

This slow, even indifferent response seemed to mock the petitioners’ seriousness. After a mass meeting on a Sunday, many protesters took to the streets. The police confronted them, relying on a rather indiscriminate spray of rubber bullets.

The crowd fought back, shouting “azikhwelwa,” meaning that everything must shut down: no one goes to work, no one attends school.

“People knew how to act from the days of the liberation struggle,” said Mr. Maya, the protest leader. “We sang the songs, telling those who are scared to step aside so the brave can move ahead and advance the struggle.

“In South Africa, the struggle is not yet over.”

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Clinton Hails New S. African Government's Policies on HIV/AIDS

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 8, 2009

PRETORIA, South Africa, Aug. 7 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday welcomed the new South African government's approach to fighting HIV/AIDS after years in which officials questioned the link between the two and suggested such "cures" as eating beets and garlic.

"We have the challenge everyone is aware of. We have to make up for some lost time, but we are looking forward," Clinton said at a U.S.-funded clinic where patients receive antiretroviral drugs.

The clinic visit underscored a new juncture in U.S.-South African relations after years of tensions over AIDS, the Iraq war and other issues. Clinton wants to improve ties with a country regarded as Africa's economic powerhouse, and she and the South African foreign minister agreed to work together more closely on such issues as climate change and nuclear nonproliferation.

Clinton was accompanied to several of her meetings by Eric Goosby, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator. That "shows how eager we are to broaden and deepen our relationship" with the new government led by President Jacob Zuma, she said.

South Africa has the highest number of HIV-positive people in the world, with about one in five adults, or nearly 6 million people, infected. But under Zuma's predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, authorities questioned whether HIV caused AIDS and were skeptical about treating it with antiretroviral drugs. One of Mbeki's health ministers urged HIV-positive people to cure themselves by eating lemons, beets and garlic.

The policies caused the premature deaths of an estimated 365,000 people, according to a recent study by Harvard University researchers.

Goosby said in an interview that he was "thrilled" about the AIDS policies of Zuma, who has pledged to halve the incidence of HIV in the country.

The U.S. government's global AIDS program has a major presence in South Africa, spending $550 million a year on treatment and testing. Clinton said the U.S. program "stands ready to work with the South African government in whatever way the government believes is effective."

Clinton's delegation toured a clinic in the poor mining town of Cullinan, outside Pretoria, that is funded by the U.S. and South African governments. She was greeted in the courtyard of the low-slung building by about two dozen children in pink and red T-shirts, some of them patients at the clinic, others orphans whose parents had died of AIDS-related illnesses.

Before the facility opened in 2006, the nearest clinic that treated people with HIV/AIDS was 40 miles away, and transportation there was too expensive for many residents, officials said.

"It has changed life around this place as people used to know it," South Africa's new health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, told Clinton after she toured the clinic.

A young woman who has been treated at the clinic, Simangele Ncube, told Clinton that when she tested positive for HIV, "I felt like the world was collapsing in on me."

But "here I am -- and I look good," she said.

More than 900 people die of AIDS-related causes each day in South Africa. U.S. Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), the head of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds foreign aid programs, said at the ceremony that she hopes to see more assistance going toward prevention, rather than just treatment.

South Africa is the second stop on Clinton's seven-nation swing through Africa, a trip aimed at improving ties with the continent and addressing security, economic and development concerns.

One of Clinton's priorities is building closer ties with what she called "major and emerging global powers," including South Africa and countries such as China, India and Brazil.

The Obama administration is especially hopeful that South Africa will push the authoritarian president of neighboring Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, to cease harassment of opposition leaders and the media.

South Africa's foreign minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, said her government was trying to persuade Mugabe to make more progress on a power-sharing agreement signed in February with the opposition. But South Africa gave no indication Friday that it would go as far as the United States wanted.

Recession Worsens South Africa's Chronic Unemployment

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 16, 2009

KGOTSONG, South Africa -- The economic crisis is causing South Africa, like many countries, to hemorrhage jobs. But its far deeper unemployment problem is represented not by pink slips but by the many people in this dusty rural township who do not work and never have.

One recent weekday, Fikile Present, 25, was doing little more than hanging out inside the shack he shares with his mother, because he had no job to go to. Neither did the neighbor sweeping her dirt yard, the guy biking through town, the women waiting for work on the corner and the ragged crew sifting through garbage at the dump.

Places like Kgotsong exist all over South Africa, where it often seems joblessness, now at more than 23 percent, is a way of life. The nation that is Africa's economic engine has long had one of the world's highest rates of unemployment, an intractable legacy of apartheid that economists deem the root of South Africa's stubborn poverty and inequality. It is also a prime illustration of the failure of democratic governments to extend economic freedom to a black majority that won liberation 15 years ago but remains South Africa's most out-of-work group.

"I dreamed about myself being a technician or working in an engineering office," said Present, adding that he regularly seeks work. "That is all in the past. Now what I'm looking for is a job. Any job."

There is little consensus on a solution. But experts agree that joblessness is costly to South Africa, which helps support nearly one-quarter of the population with the developing world's biggest welfare program. Some warn that chronic unemployment is a tinderbox for instability of the sort that flared last year, when poor South Africans unleashed a wave of violence against foreigners they accused of taking their jobs.

"Worst of all, unemployment is a terrible waste of human potential," said Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Center for Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg. "Almost every unemployed person could and should be doing productive work that would improve their lives and develop the country."

President Jacob Zuma, a populist elected a few months ago on promises of spreading wealth, has pledged to create half a million jobs this year and 3.5 million more by 2014. But the promised jobs are temporary public works positions that might not lead to true employment gains. And with South Africa now in recession after years of steady growth, economists say the government will have a hard enough time saving jobs, much less creating them.

The Shadow of Apartheid

In Kgotsong, an arid grid of shacks and low-slung houses in South Africa's corn belt, the promises inspire scant hope. According to the most recent data, more than 41 percent of people here are unemployed. Present said most people he knows survive on state grants. He is among them: With no skills to market, he is largely supported by his mother's monthly $120 old-age grant.

Present is just one job-seeker in a pool that is massive by almost any standard. Across impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, the unemployment rate is about 8 percent, according to a recent International Labor Organization report, though a majority of the employed have informal jobs and make less than $2 a day. In middle-income countries more comparable with South Africa, such as Chile and Malaysia, the rate is typically less than half of South Africa's.

But economists warn that it is unwise to compare South Africa's labor market with others because its problem is rooted in a history unlike any other nation's.

Under apartheid, a white supremacist government isolated blacks in crowded townships and desolate rural areas with weak transportation links to urban areas and schools designed to keep them under-educated. Blacks' opportunities to start businesses were limited, stunting the entrepreneurial knowledge that fuels informal economies in many other developing nations.

"Employment is about one thing leading to another. And that's a historical process," said Miriam Altman, executive director of the Center of Poverty, Employment and Growth at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. "Here in South Africa, they specifically excluded the majority of the population -- from employment and from living in the right places."

When apartheid ended in 1994, a glut of unskilled black workers entered the labor market. But once-powerful agriculture and mining industries, which provided most of the jobs in places such as Kgotsong, have shrunk and become mechanized, shifting the economy toward one favoring skilled workers.

Many apartheid-era problems remain. The townships where many blacks live still have poor transportation and abysmal schools that do not prepare students for the job market: As of 2007, the high school pass rate for blacks, who make up 80 percent of the population, was slightly more than half that for the 10 percent who are white.

"Learners are being promoted out of the school system, and the situation is just doom in front of them," said Mlungisi Nyamane, a former high school principal in Kgotsong who described schools there as "terrible." He recently began advising jobless residents on launching businesses -- something he said they "never dreamed" of during apartheid -- but most have no money, speak little English and know nothing about writing business plans.

A Need for Low-Skill Jobs

From the perspective of those in Kgotsong, joblessness is a complex equation of penury and connections both geographical and political.

Day jobs can be found at the industrial zone in the nearby town, Present said, but usually there are many more seekers than work, and the three-mile minibus trip costs 70 cents. He gets occasional construction gigs, but employers want a certificate of expertise. There is farm work, but it pays $5 a day, lunch eats some of that pay and extreme conditions spur sickness, he said, concluding that "it's better to do nothing."

On a recent morning, Present and two jobless friends walked under a blazing sun toward the computer lab at the tiny library to check on résumés they had posted to a Web site called Jobmail. Outside, they ran into Master Medupe, smiling on his bicycle.

"I'm 37. I've never had a permanent job," Medupe said by way of introduction. He said he was volunteering for a politician he hoped would reward him with work. "To survive, you have to meet the relevant people."

Inside, under dangling posters of Garfield the cat, young men paged through newspapers advertising work for tailors and drivers with experience. The three computers were not working, as is often the case.

How to create large numbers of low-skill jobs is the subject of vigorous debate, in part because there has been little assessment of the many job-creation programs the government has launched over the years.

Some researchers suggest attracting investors with special economic zones or boosting vocational education. Many say South Africa crucially needs to loosen labor regulations that make hiring and firing difficult and keep wages for unskilled workers significantly higher than in comparable economies.

"At this point, the urgency is for creating jobs at the skill level you have," said Sandeep Mahajan, the World Bank's lead economist here. "Given the low levels, it comes back to manufacturing, perhaps the informal sector and agriculture. . . . That's the dilemma this government faces."

But liberalized labor laws are anathema to the powerful unions that support the ruling African National Congress and helped propel Zuma to power. In recent weeks, the unions have been pressuring the Reserve Bank to lower interest rates to invigorate the business climate and generate jobs.

There was hope in Kgotsong for mass employment two years ago, as plans developed for a corn-based biofuels plant that was expected to create 10,000 jobs. Government officials halted the project over concerns about food security.

On a recent afternoon inside a bar, Momgezi Sebotho lamented the turn of events.

"I say to the people, let's go to the mountain. . . . The mountain will never come to you," said Sebotho, 42, who works at a nearby water plant. "Let's help the government to be able to create jobs."

How? "It's difficult," he said, shaking his head.