Rock God X wrote:Whether they had a right to 'be there' or not, they had no right to treat black people like animals.
That's the Dutch for you!
But it is easy to look at these things in a moralistic way with the benefit of hindsight. But when the white settlers arrived the black tribal populations were in various phases of development that Europeans had been through, in some cases, thousands of years beforehand - stoneage upwards. The minority white settlers built properity from scratch and could not safely have offered democracy to the indigenous population until their level of cultaural development (for want of a better term) was suffcient. At what point in SA's history that was, I do not know. But given, the "land of the free" (USA) treated its black population represensibly until just a few years before apartheid collapsed with far less "reason" maybe the timing was not too far wrong?
If you want an example of what can go wrong by giving majority rule too early, look at Zimbabwe. A once prosperous country brought to its knees.
PS
EVERY single black African I spoke to in Zimbabwe and Zambia in the last years of apartheid said they wanted to go to live in SA because their lives would be much better there.
