INEQUALITY
JONNY STEINBERG: Fusion of wealth and esteem creates a lopsided world
The fusion of wealth and significance is a force of enormous depth and it swept people like Mandela aside
It has become ever so fashionable to blame Nelson Mandela for our woes. He cursed his descendants, it is said, because he negotiated a settlement that kept the worst of the past alive. Fashionable, but also careless and lazy. The forces that have shaped our world were not only beyond the control of Mandela and his generation, but utterly alien to them. He and his comrades have little to do with the inequalities that have evolved since the end of apartheid. A story or two shows that this is so. When Walter Sisulu was elected secretary-general of the ANC in 1949, he gave up his job as an estate agent, his sole source of income at the time. He was 36 years old and the father of a growing brood of children. He needed to earn decent money. The ANC offered to pay him £5 a year but never did. And so it was left to his wife, Albertina, to support the family on her nurse’s wage. For Walter, there was a choice: he could either do something of great significance or he could earn a living. It w...
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