Lyle, like Asasin you've fallen into the trap of seeing what you want to see, not reading what I wrote. I made a clear distinction between institutionized racism and predjudice. I am not comparing the systematic racism that was present in SA with the predjudices that are present in Aus or NZ or any other multicultural country for that matter. What I am saying is that predjudice is everywhere.
Lozza, saying that Saffies got jobs or opportunities because of their colour is a simplification. When I was 10 my parents considered emigration from the UK to either SA or Aus. Had they have chosen Aus there is no reason I would have turned out any different to what I turned out to be as a result of the SA education system because of my upbringing and background.
With a large population of unskilled labour on which it could draw the salaries were low. This is simple economics. Large supply equals low price. Curiously the mines drew much of their labour from outside SA where those people had been "emancipated". The salaries in SA, low as they were, were still higher than those they could command in their own countries.
The idea that whites in SA have a very high standard of living is false. It was, in the '70's not very different to standards of living in Aus. But it was limited to the whites.
Apartheids greatest crime was (in my opinion) the denial of opportunites to people who may have wished to join the western world (for want of a better expression). That is, to gain an education and join the middle classes. Curiously it was Smuts, not the apartheid govt, that denied them this opportunity in 1925. It was this act (following the miners strike where the miners demanded that the blacks be limited to manual labour) that, in my opinion, sealed that countries fate. By condemning the blacks in SA to a life in poverty they also ensured that their population growth rates would be high (poverty and high population growth rates go hand in hand). A large population of poor people is a recipe for civil unrest.
Had SA not denied the blacks those opportunities a number of things would have happened, firstly the black population growth rate would have slowed down considerably, second, because of greater human resources, the economic growth rate would have been higher, leading, in turn, to a slower population growth rate. I mentioned earlier that apartheid was economic suicide. This is why. But this is all conjecture.
Oh yeah Lyle: I was well aware of Wouter Bassons experiments.
Just to re-iterate, I was not, in my original posting in this thread, drawing a comparison between the institutionized racism that was present in SA to that in Aus or NZ but (in jest and probably poor taste) comparing the predjudices shared between those countries.
