Kentridge on postapartheid South Africa

From a profile of the artist, who was born and lives in Johannesbug, in The New Yorker:

One of the strange things about postapartheid South Africa, [Kentridge said], is that so little has changed. “In many parts of the country, it hasn’t changed at all. Children in poor rural schools still get a miserable education. It’s also true that the main beneficiaries since the ending of apartheid are white South Africans. No sacrifices have been required. No one’s lost their beautiful house. There’s lots of violence around, but you had that before–now you have more of it. That’s the price of extreme inequality. There may not be a correlation between poverty and crime but there’s a very clear one between extreme inequality and crime, and a whole history of reasons why it’s as nasty and violent as it is. In South Africa, there is never an assumption that a calm and gentle death is one’s birthright. September 11th in America had an interesting effect here. It helped a lot of us understand that living in a dangerous, unstable world was not only a South African phenomenon, and that made people here less anxious to leave.

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