page_title: History of South Africa
section_title: Emigration, debt burden and poverty
hierarchical_section_title: History of South Africa / Post-apartheid period (1994–present) / Emigration, debt burden and poverty
caption_attribution_description: English: Church on Green Market Square in Cape Town, South Africa with a banner commemorating the Marikana massacre This media shows a South African Protected Site with SAHRA file reference 9/2/018/0092.
context_page_description: The first modern humans are believed to have inhabited South Africa more than 100,000 years ago. South Africa's prehistory has been divided into two phases based on broad patterns of technology namely the Stone Age and Iron Age. After the discovery of hominins at Taung and australopithecine fossils in limestone caves at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai these areas were collectively designated a World Heritage site. The first inhabitants of South Africa are collectively referred to as the Khoisan, the Khoi Khoi and the San separately. These groups were displaced or sometimes absorbed by migrating Africans during the Bantu expansion from Western and Central Africa. While some maintained separateness, others were grouped into a category known as Coloureds, a multiracial ethnic group which includes people with shared ancestry from two or more of these groups: Khoisan, Bantu, English, Afrikaners, Austronesians, East Asians and South Asians. European exploration of the African coast began in the 13th century when Portugal committed itself to discover an alternative route to the silk road that would lead to China.
context_section_description: The immediate post-apartheid period was marked by an exodus of skilled, white South Africans amid crime related safety concerns. The South African Institute of Race Relations estimated in 2008 that 800,000 or more white people had emigrated since 1995, out of the approximately 4,000,000 who were in South Africa when apartheid formally ended the year before. Large white South African diasporas, both English- and Afrikaans-speaking, sprouted in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and especially in the UK, to which around 550,000 South Africans emigrated.
  The apartheid government had declared a moratorium on foreign debt repayments in the mid-1980s, when it declared a state of emergency in the face of escalating civil unrest. With the formal end of apartheid in 1994, the new democratic government was saddled with an onerous foreign debt amounting to R86,700,000,000 (US$14,000,000,000 at then current exchange rates) accrued by the former apartheid regime. The cash-strapped post-apartheid government was obliged to repay this debt or else face a credit downgrading by foreign financial institutions. The debt was finally settled in September 2001.
  A further financial burden was imposed on the new post-apartheid government through its obligation to provide antiretroviral (ARV) treatment to impoverished victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping the country. South Africa had the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS compared to any other country in the world, with 5,600,000 people afflicted by the disease and 270,000 HIV-related deaths were recorded in 2011. By that time, more than 2,000,000 children were orphaned due to the epidemic. The provision of ARV treatment resulted in 100,000 fewer AIDS-related deaths in 2011 than in 2005.
   Migrant labour remained a fundamental aspect of the South African mining industry, which employed half a million mostly black miners. Labour unrest in the industry resulted in a massacre in mid-August 2012, when anti-riot police shot dead 34 striking miners and wounded many more in what is known as the Marikana massacre. The incident was widely criticised by the public, civil society organisations and religious leaders. The migrant labour system was identified as a primary cause of the unrest. Multi-national mining corporations including Anglo-American Corporation, Lonmin, and Anglo Platinum, were accused of failing to address the enduring legacies of apartheid.
  By 2014, around 47% of (mostly black) South Africans continued to live in poverty, making it one of the most unequal countries in the world. Widespread dissatisfaction with the slow pace of socio-economic transformation, government incompetence and maladministration, and other public grievances in the post-apartheid era, precipitated many violent protest demonstrations. In 2007, less than half the protests were associated with some form of violence, compared with 2014, when almost 80% of protests involved violence on the part of the participants or the authorities. The slow pace of transformation also fomented tensions within the tripartite alliance between the ANC, the Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
  The ANC had risen to power on the strength of a socialist agenda embodied in a Freedom Charter, which was intended to form the basis of ANC social, economic and political policies. The Charter decreed that "the national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people; the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people". ANC icon Nelson Mandela, asserted in a statement released on 25 January 1990: "The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable." But, after the ANC's electoral victory in 1994, the eradication of mass poverty through nationalisation was never implemented. The ANC-led government, in a historic reversal of policy, adopted neoliberalism instead. A wealth tax on the super-rich to fund dev
caption: Church on Greenmarket Square in Cape Town, South Africa with a banner memorialising the Marikana massacre
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