Post-Apartheid Inequality Sparks Frustration and Fury in South Africa

The trip from Pretoria to Mabopane starts on a six-lane highway lined with malls and office parks, passes verdant gated communities featuring pools and gardens, and ends in the dusty township north of South Africa’s capital where the trees, shops, and sumptuous homes make way for stark, single-story cinder-block structures in dirt yards. Inside one of them—the Katekani Community Development Project, a collection of brick buildings behind a barbed-wire fence—Beauty Mokubung and a handful of other women sit at sewing machines, hoping for orders from local schools for uniforms to augment their meager incomes.

The end of apartheid has done little to improve the lot of the 71-year-old, who is among the 18 million South Africans on welfare. Those people—about a third of the population—are now reeling from the first real erosion in social payments in more than a quarter-century. As inflation ticks up, Mokubung’s government pension hasn’t kept pace, leaving her with just 1,890 rand ($131) a month to support herself and three grown, unemployed grandchildren, whose parents died of AIDS.