The Eastern Cape, Mandela's Homeland, Still Suffers from Neglect and Misrule

From World » Alex Perry | TIME.com Sat Dec 14 2013, 01:25:50

The first time I visited Mthatha, 2009, parents were refusing to let their kids walk to school for fear they would be raped and virtually every lamp-post was plastered with flyers for same-day abortions. The second, 2012, as I drove in, a young beggar with filthy clothes and a dirty face knocked on my window when I stopped at a set of lights - to distract me so his two companions could open a rear door and rifle my bag. A few blocks later, when I pulled over for directions, the woman I asked initially told me to get out of town. "You shouldn't be out here alone," she said. "Tsotsis [gangsters] are everywhere." When Nelson Mandela's body is flown to Mthatha in the Eastern Cape Saturday ahead of his burial Sunday in the nearby village of Qunu, he will be returning to his home and to the heartland of his African National Congress (A.N.C.) - and also to one of the most egregious examples of A.N.C. failure in power. Today while cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town enjoy a new cosmopolitanism, a third visit on Wednesday confirmed once again that transformation is far less marked in the Eastern Cape. So do the statistics. A full 88% of people of the province's population still live below the poverty line, according to government figures, millions of them in the same township shacks and grass-roofed huts that they occupied under apartheid. Government services are dire to non-existent: power, if it exists, can black out for days, while provincial statistics show 78.3% of the population have no running water and 93.3% have no sewers, prompting intermittent outbreaks of cholera. HIV/AIDS rates run at 13%, rising to a third in some townships. Unemployment is officially 41%, though non-governmental studies put it at 70%. The destitution nurtures an epidemic of violent crime. The South African Police Service says the Eastern Cape has the country's highest homicide rate and Mthatha's, at 130 people per 100,000, is three times the provincial rate and one of the highest

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