A black middle class is emerging, but poverty and crime blight millions of lives

TEBOGO, aged 25, is a security guard in Johannesburg, earning just 11.38 rand an hour. Improperly classified as “self-employed”, he gets no paid holiday, sick leave or other benefits. By dint of working a 12-hour day, 25 days a month, he manages to earn 3,400 rand a month. Out of this he has to pay 250 rand rent to a friend who allows him to live in a one-room shack in his yard, next to seven others. Their 15 occupants share a single pit-latrine and outside water tap. Tebogo pays his employer 390 rand a month for transport and 98 rand for the uniform he is obliged to wear. Another 350 rand a month goes on maintenance for his six-year-old daughter. He also gives about 800 rand a month to his parents, who have no other source of income. In a good month that leaves Tebogo with about 1,500 rand for himself and his studies. He would like to become a radio journalist one day.

Lindiwe is a 58-year-old cleaner for a block of offices. For an eight-hour day, five days a week, she earns a basic 1,500 rand a month, which tips bring up to 2,100 rand That has to keep her, her unemployed husband and two grandchildren whom she looks after. Having inherited her parents’ home, she pays no rent, but spends around 55 rand a month on electricity, 30 rand on water and 300 rand a month on her one-hour bus journey to work. During apartheid, she used to work as a domestic servant for a white family, living in a one-room shack at the bottom of the garden and working 13 hours a day, seven days a week. On her one weekend off a month she would try to visit her two children who were being brought up by her mother in Soweto, a sprawling black township south of Johannesburg.

Tebogo and Lindiwe are poor, but at least they have a regular job; many don’t. In 2008 three-quarters of South Africans had incomes below 50,000 rand a year. Of these, 83% were black (who make up 75% of the workforce) and just 6.5% white (13% of the workforce). Only 0.6% of South Africans earned over 750,000 rand, of whom three-quarters were white and 16% (or about 30,000 individuals) black (see table 3). A further 265,000 blacks were earning 300,000-750,000 rand, and 1.6m were getting 100,000-300,000. That means nearly 2m black individuals (and probably three times as many if immediate family members are included) are now members of the newly emerging black middle class. Like their white counterparts, these so-called “black diamonds” tend to live in secure gated communities, send their children to private schools, take out private health insurance, work out in air-conditioned gyms, dine in fancy restaurants and buy expensive cars. It is at this level that most racial mixing and a few interracial marriages take place.

Thanks to a massive increase in welfare spending, millions have been lifted out of the worst poverty. Since 1996 average black income per person has more than tripled in real terms, to nearly 20,000 rand. But average white income per person over the same period has risen almost as fast, to 136,000 rand—seven times as much as that for blacks. South Africa, always among the world’s most unequal societies, has become even more so. Those in the middle, too well-off to qualify for welfare grants but too poor to have joined the black middle class, feel particularly aggrieved.

Black living conditions have nevertheless improved in other ways. Three-quarters of all South African families now live in a “formal” home (usually a concrete or brick bungalow instead of a rough shack or thatched mud hut), up from just under two-thirds in 1996. The vast majority now have electricity and access to clean piped water (see table 4). Half of black families have flushing loos, compared with barely a third in 1996; three-quarters have a television; and eight in ten have access to a phone, usually a mobile. Many municipalities provide a basic amount of water, electricity and sanitation free to poor families.

Expectations soared when the ANC first swept into power promising “a better life for all”. Yet many see little improvement in their own lives, finding themselves without a job in the same rickety shacks as before. They feel trapped. A study by the Medical Research Council highlights the deep unhappiness and growing sense of alienation among the young in particular. One in five teenagers aged 15-17 had tried to commit suicide during the preceding six months; 29% had been binge-drinking at least once in the previous month; 19% had become pregnant or fathered a child; 20% were overweight. According to another study, four out of ten black and three out of ten white and Indian youngsters aged 13-15 feel so disillusioned that they want to get out of the country as soon as they can.

Those young people are increasingly taking to the streets to vent their anger, looting stores, blocking highways and attacking the police with petrol bombs and rocks. The police retaliate with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and, some claim, live ammunition, adding to the sense of insecurity in the townships. When it comes to tackling crime, though, the police, poorly paid, inadequately staffed and often corrupt, are regarded as pretty hopeless, and the poor cannot afford to pay for their own protection.

The middle classes, on the other hand, black as much as white, barricade themselves behind layer upon layer of security: high perimeter walls topped with electric fencing, guard dogs, barred doors and windows and alarm systems linked to one of the many armed private security forces. Many go to live in one of the increasingly popular fortress-like gated communities, protected around the clock by armed guards. South Africa now has 300,000 private security guards, almost double the number of police. Since 1996 the government has almost tripled its spending on tackling crime. But private-sector spending has risen even faster.

Victims all

“The crime situation in South Africa has become so severe that the sad reality is that it’s not if, but when, you will become a victim,” said a Durban magistrate when sentencing three men for throwing a teacher off a high bridge after hijacking her car last November. “We are scared to the point where we are no longer free.” Max Price, the normally unflappable vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said after the murder in March of yet another member of the university’s staff: “We no longer trust strangers and we hate what we have become.” These are not Mr Mbeki’s hysterical white whingers. They just want their country to rid itself of this evil.

The World Competitiveness Survey rates South Africa worst out of 133 countries for crime. A staggering 50 murders, 100 rapes, 330 armed robberies and 550 violent assaults are recorded every day. More than the level of crime, it is the sheer gratuitousness of the violence that is shocking. A 12-month-old baby is beaten to a pulp by house burglars in an upmarket Johannesburg suburb. A shopkeeper pleads with robbers to take everything he has but spare his life; they shoot him anyway. A man mowing his lawn in Cape Town is shot dead for the sake of his mobile phone. Under apartheid most crime was contained within the poor black townships. Now it is everywhere. It is not only whites who complain; everyone is afraid. In one recent poll, nearly two-thirds of South Africans said they would feel “very unsafe” walking alone in their neighbourhood after dark. Another study in 2007 found that 22% had had personal experience of crime in the preceding year.

Six in ten South Africans believe that crime has risen since 1994. Yet, if the official statistics are to be believed, the crime rate for the 21 most serious offences has actually fallen by 17%. The rate of murder and attempted murder has almost halved; that of violent assault is down by a quarter; and that of burglary of residential properties has dropped by 15%. However, a new study by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation finds a “pervasive pattern of (police) manipulation of the statistics”, particularly since the government announced in 2004 that it aimed to cut crime by 7-10% a year. That could account for much of the apparent reduction in crime.

The murder statistics are probably pretty accurate, though. These show that the murder rate dropped from 66.9 per 100,000 people in 1994-95 (when a virtual civil war was raging in KwaZulu-Natal) to 37.3 in 2008-09. This still leaves South Africa among the world’s ten most murderous countries. America has a rate of 5.4 per 100,000, England and Wales 1.2 and Japan 0.4. Rape, on the other hand, is usually vastly underreported. The police say that sexual offences have risen by nearly half since 1994, to more than 70,000, about half of them rape. But the real figure for rape is probably nine times as high, says the Medical Research Council. In a recent study of men aged 18-49, 28% admitted at least one rape. Four in ten women say their first experience of sex was rape.

Sexual violence seems to be less shocking to black communities than to white ones. According to another CSVR study, most black women believe that a man has a right to have sex with his wife whenever he wants. A majority of teenage boys and girls say it is not sexual violence to force sex on someone you know or who has accepted a drink from you. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby, thinks the level of violence against women in South Africa is “shockingly high”.

Mr Zuma takes anxieties over crime more seriously than Mr Mbeki did. South Africa’s citizens have been allowed “to live in fear for too long”, he says. He has promised to boost target police numbers from 183,000 to 205,000 over three years, upgrade their training and make it easier for them to use lethal force. Not everyone is happy. A total of 568 people were shot dead by police in 2008-09, including 32 innocent bystanders. Over the same period 107 police officers were killed.

Harsher punishment has been tried, with tough minimum sentences introduced in 1997, but seems to have had little effect. It did, however, push up the prison population by 40% to 165,000, proportionately one of the highest in the world. Almost half of all convicts are now serving sentences of ten years or more, compared with under 2% in 1995. The number of inmates on remand has doubled and now accounts for a third of the prison population. Some 234,000 cases are awaiting trial. At the present rate of hearings it would take ten years to clear the backlog, the government admits.

South Africans constantly debate why their country is plagued by so much violent crime. The blame is variously put on the brutal legacy of apartheid, widespread poverty, appalling levels of unemployment, the absence of a father in two out of three black homes, high alcohol and drug abuse, and extremes of inequality. All may play a part. But the UN says that there is “no easy correlation” between poverty, development levels, inequality and crime, so it cannot be the whole answer.