If you have been following the news (or picked up Tuesday’s NY Times - see here for the front-page article - if you read anything it should be that or this or this), you’ve seen the anti-immigrant riots in the Johannesburg townships. The mass influx of Zimbabwean refugees, combined with general unrest over immigration has reached a boiling point, and the horrors of apartheid-era vigilante justice of what would be termed “black-on-black crime” in the USA has returned, specifically the practice of Necklacing. South Africa may be on the cusp of civil war, depending on how far the violence spreads. All it would take is a mob of less than a thousand in JoBurg or Cape Town to burn either city to the grand and trigger a mass exodus. If that were to happen, South Africa as we know it would no longer exist. The image on the front page of Wednesday’s Cape Times is utterly gruesome, with an immigrant set on fire while police half-heartedly attempt to pull the burning blankets of his charred body. This is another burning that took place this week: So what’s the real issue here? Desire For Instant Gratification - the bane of all humanity. You have an underclass that for generations was forced into menial jobs and uneducated. Then, in an instant after the 1994 elections and the official handover of power and end of apartheid, scores of eager and clueless politicians promised the world to the the underclass, tinged with socialist rhetoric and ignorance. People were put into jobs they were not qualified for; handouts were given across the board without any conditions; the workers with all the skills and ability to train newly empowered workers were forced into retirement. (race is irrelevant here - the operating word is “politicians.”) How can anyone expect to right generations of wrong in one fell swoop? It was preposterous, most everyone knew it, and South Africa’s old government and new government lacked the willpower to do anything about it, tempered by a very real potential for civil war. Yet this civil war, which was so tenuously avoided in the early 90s, may have only been delayed. Many members of the Xhosa and Zulu communities readily admit that their community is lazy and doesn’t want to work, and the frustration that is borne from this is manifested in opportunistic xenophobic attacks. But yet not all townships are suffering the kind of violence seen in Johannesburg. I spent part of Tuesday morning in Langa, taking a look at a restoration project to fix up some decrepit rooms at the Chris Hani Independent School (yes, the one that Oprah sponsored briefly). This project is being led by the Star Partnership, a non-profit that focus on community-based skills and entrepreneurial development mostly in South African townships. The school, which is overcrowded and needs to take breaks in shifts (hence the urgency of the repair project) is full of hyper-active playing kids that would be at home in any city in the US, from Darien, CT to Gardena, CA. Here’s a shot from inside the room that is under construction looking out at one of the playgrounds: One fascinating item of note is that the townships are the only places where kids play in the street anymore in South Africa. With the level of kidnapping, assault, and rape that plaugues South Africa, kids are no longer safe in the street except in the dirt streets surrounded by makeshift shacks in the townships. And while this bitter irony has been the obvious reality for upwards of a decade, continued lawlessness only serves to eliminate quite possibly one of the only things that one could ever view as a positive to life in a township.