Nations with vast amounts of illiteracy cannot have free elections of any meaningful kind, so it always galls me to see India referred to as 'the world's largest democracy.' The same goes for Indonesia.

It's no big deal--S. Africa just used little party symbols and fols understood them fine.

South Africa is a democracy? That's news to me. It looks like an inept one-party military dictatorship with populist/socialist/Marxist rhetoric and a kleptocratic ruling class, Peronism in blackface.

The two aren't mutually exclusive--look at France.

French people are certainly literate, perhaps too literate. Tragically, they too often believe what they read.

The French ruling elite is certainly kleptocratic but it is a multiparty democracy where the government does alternate from right to left, if not necessarily ever leaving the hands of Enarques.

Military it is not.

OTOH, the ANC is not likely to relinquish power any time soon and would certainly revert to Mugabe tactics were they to become unpopular at the polling booth.

BTW, there is probably no one for whom I have less sympathy than White South Africans and Rhodesians, happy to lord it over the Black majority but incapable of fighting to keep their position at the top and unwilling to do the work themselves. They are what the Confederates would have been if they had been girlymen.

The Afrikaaners served our purposes. There was no way we could leave the Cape and Africa's minerals in charge of black governments during WWII or WWIII.

OJ, in that you are partially correct. However, the South African state was a cruel hoax. If the Whites didn't want to give Blacks political power, they should have been willing to do the work themselves, while forcing the Black population onto areas of the region they did not want. If they wanted to have the Blacks do the work, they needed to give them political power. If they wanted to hold all the political power, then they could have fought for it. The ANC was little more than a ragtag groups of criminals, and if the Whites had decided to forego Black labor, they could have been dealt with in a matter of days.

Cote d'Ivoire was in the hands of a Black government and was certainly friendly to America under Houphouet-Boigny. The former Belgian Congo was under a Black government and we got what we needed out of there. Liberia was essentially our colony.

Bart:

They were too decent to fight for it. Democratic rhetoric always trumps power politics in the long run. That's why all our authoritarian allies evolved quickly into democracies--Spain, Chile, the Philippines, S. Korea, Taiwan, S. Africa, etc.

Other than South Africa all the others developed a significant educated middle class capable of avoiding the loopy excesses of Marxism, although Filipino elections are pretty embarassing.

The Afrikaners were simply cowardly and effete.