Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge
This important book painstakingly documents the meager and uncertain economic condition of most South African blacks as a starting point for thinking about how to achieve a more equal distribution of opportunity-now and in the period after apartheid. Significant in its insistence on preparing today for economic and political institutions in a majority-ruled South Africa, the study also has implications reaching beyond the borders of the republic, in its incisive analysis of the links between institutionalized inequality and persistent poverty.
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For much of Africa this year, immediate threats to survival dominated national agendas. In the extreme north and south, Libya and South Africa attacked the territory of weaker neighbors. Less noticed but far more widely devastating, a harsh drought destroyed crops across the continent, confronting more than 20 million people with the prospect of starvation. Declining rates of per capita food production over the last decade, coupled with escalating debt and falling returns on exports, left many African states at the margins of existence--at least according to Western calculations. And at year's end, a military coup abruptly ended four years of American-style democratic government in Africa's largest nation, Nigeria, renewing fears about political upheaval throughout the continent.
