How much of a global network do I really have?

This is a non-exhaustive list of destinations that are a direct flight from either Lagos or Abuja. Do I know anyone who would want to share a weekend in one of these places? I've already got takers for a few of them.

Dubai
Frankfurt
Istanbul
Milan
Cairo
Rome
Accra
Freetown
Nairobi
Abidian
Douala
Madrid
Dakar
Amsterdam
Beirut
London

Affirmative action in Nigeria: a case study on non-racial (or “micro-racial”) AA

I'm on a project with a Nigerian co-worker, and we've had some good conversations.  For someone from the U.S. I actually know a good bit about Nigerian politics, but after exhausting that I asked him for more, and I learned about Nigeria's own version of affirmative action (AA).

The south is generally better educated than the north.  (To repeat what I posted earlier, one person told me that it is a reflection of education in madrasas in the north vs. regular schools in the south.)  The nation does a careful balancing act because of tribal and religious tension.  Because of this, important places like universities, government departments, and national companies have quotas for people from different states.  These quotas are generally in proportion to a state's population.  (However, no one trusts the population/census figures.)

 

The "Ritz Hotel" in Benin City. There is also a "Ritz Carleton" hotel.

The way they enforce this is just like the way SA admits people to universities: for example, if you are from a northern state, you might need an 80 on a university entrance exam to go to a prestigious school; if you are from the south you might need a 92.  These cutoffs are set based on how low they need to go to get the requisite number of people from each pool.

I asked this guy his opinion on AA and was surprised by his vehement diatribe against it – in all forms, both in SA and in Nigeria.

Why?  Some of his points were familiar (you are promoting incompetent people, etc.).  One key one: AA is actually hurting the country by pushing good people out of the country.  If you look ahead and realize that you will have to wait and watch less qualified people get promoted before you, you are much more likely to leave the country so you can compete on your own merits.

I find Nigerian AA fascinating because it is AA that isn't race-based in the traditional sense (black/white/etc.) and is instead based on where you were born.  It could in some ways be considered "micro-racial" in that where you are born has a strong correlation with your tribe.

I questioned whether the Nigerian AA was really a religious AA disguised as geographic (i.e. the north is Muslim, south is Christian, and therefore by helping people from the north through AA it could be that you are pushing a religion and disguising it as geographic).  He emphasized that seeing everything in religious terms here is not accurate; tribal ties are stronger than religious ones.

Working in the global lingua franca (which isn’t Italian)

Nigeria and South Africa have at least one thing in common: both have multiple language groups that can't communicate in their first tongue.  SA's answer was to institute 11 national languages, though English, Zulu, and Afrikans dominate.  Nigeria's answer was different: one national language (English).  From my experience so far it seems that conversational English is more universal in Nigeria than in South Africa.  (I read somewhere that only about 60% of SAs speak English, but I couldn't find anything to back that up.  Only ~9% speak it is a native language.)  A South African I work with agreed.  The degree/quality of that English varies, but everyone I've met can have a basic conversation.  However, everyone I've encountered is likely to have better English than the norm (hotels, international company, service industries like car drivers who interact with foreigners, etc.).

 

Nigeria recently started a national oral English exam (previously it was just written).  One client complained because now people speak English in their homes so that kids learn it better growing up, and he says it is hurting kids' cultural identities.

Courtyard in the Abuja Sheraton.  Not great as a hotel, but it is a "campus" with space to roam.

IMG00013-20100727-0912.jpg

Except for main roads in Benin (which are paved), roads here even in the
best of times are washboardy and have sinkholes. Driving is like skiing
moguls, where you are constantly weaving to find the best path. It rained
hard this morning, and even though it was brief it was enough to flood
roads and turn inconvenient sinkholes into impassable lakes (and further
damage the roads that are just packed dirt). We went down three streets
today where we to turn around and find another way.

They are doing a lot of road construction here, and I'm sure everyone will
be appreciative when it is finished.

Week in review

A few highlights from the week:
-I met friendly German in my Benin City hotel. I asked him what brought him to Benin and he promptly and happily answered, “Beer!” He had a gut to match. Turns out he’s helping refurb a Guinness bottling plant here
-My drivers this past week were named Clever and Sunday
-I realized that my hotel bed had fleas
-I saw a motorcycle with honest-to-goodness training wheels
-I was in my first wreck in Nigeria – a motorcycle and passenger tried to zip past my car as we turned right despite our blinker. No one was hurt, but my driver is very protective of his car and the way he jumped out and ran over I was just wondering if he was choke the guy or slug him

How check in at Benin City

Here's the drill:
1) Print your receipt. Very important because they do not have a computer
and therefore have no way to look up your ticket.
2) Give receipt to the guy behind the counter. His job is to look at a
seating diagram, decide how much he likes you, and then assign you a seat
(hopefully not near the lavatories or next to the crying baby that was in
line in front of you). He then writes out your ticket by hand and tears
off the applicable part of your receipt so you can't use it again.
3) Wait. No one here cares about the "one seat between us" unofficial rule
because the objective is to sit under a ceiling fan.
4) Line up at the (only) gate and walk through metal detector that is
turned off. Get patted down, and get asked "do have a cigarette lighter,"
to which the answer is always "no."
5) Walk out to the airplane and get patted down again. Don't make the
mistake of standing in the shorter line, as this is the women's line.
6) Stow your luggage and you're off.

Religion in Nigeria

I’ve been surprised by religion here in Nigeria. I knew the basics – Muslim north, Christian south, an almost 50/50 split, tensions and occasional violence between them with churches getting torched and people getting killed. I also know that Christianity has been rising in some areas, and that some Episcopalian diocese are aligning themselves with conservative Anglican bishops in Africa.

If I didn’t know any of that, I would think that Nigeria is a very Christian nation. At the client in Benin, many doors have “John 3:16” stickers, and I have seen two people with Christian booklets at their desk. One of the 7 TV channels at the hotel is a Christian talk channel. In Abuja I read a paper that had a half-page Christian devotional/message (no corresponding Muslim message), leaders repeatedly refer to God and give credit/pin hopes on God. I went to a mall today and popped into a books/electronics store; about a third of the shelf space in the book section is devoted to religion, and almost all is Christian. While in there I heard a song I didn’t recognize that was something about praising God. (It was followed in the playlist by some hip-hop song.)

A university in Benin.

This raises two questions in my mind:
1) Is what I see religion (just outward trappings or “cultural Christianity” because everyone expects it) or genuine orthodox Christian belief?
2) What about the Muslims? Other than the large national mosque in Abuja that I can see from my hotel, I have not seen any outward signs of Islam.

I don’t know the answer to 1), and will hopefully get a chance to find out. As for 2), I think there are two main factors so far:
-I have been working in what is a mostly Christian zone, so the disparity is somewhat natural
-The Nigerian working with me said that the Muslim areas are in general poorer and less educated, partially because they have a strong system of madrasas where children learn to memorize the Koran backward and forward, but don’t learn math/science/language. My extrapolation is that institutions like newspapers or other educated areas may be disproportionately staffed by Christians.

Nigerian news

I got to read the Nigerian paper today, and I’ll have to do it again soon as it is quite entertaining. It could be informative except that most of the names and titles don’t mean anything to me. (Side note: my Sheraton Lagos hotel was referenced by an article as “one of the leading hotels in the state.”)

Some overall thoughts:
-Writers will write in first person or refer directly to the reader (“you”)
-There are definitely some “Nigenglish” phrases, such as an article titled, “Recipe for Infectious Diseases (Baked Tomatoes)”. The article is about how baked tomatoes are supposed to ward off infectious diseases, but the writer managed to convey the opposite in the title.-Public remembrances bordering on hagiography are big here. There are several full-page ads in the paper taken out for no other reason than to congratulate someone (see photo; this one looks like a company buttering up a gov't minister). The client office has posters on all the bulletin boards with pictures of employees who died and eulogies to them.
-The newspaper deals a lot more with religion than any in the U.S., in part because religion seems to be a part of normal life much more than in the U.S. There was a half-page sermon printed in today’s paper and several interviewees say things like, “the future belongs to God” when begging out of answering a hypothetical
-There are lots of long interviews with officials, but there doesn’t seem to be the same investigative/analytical piece that you can usually find in a good U.S. paper.

For your entertainment
This is straight from the paper’s Lifestyle section:

Relationship advice: Communicate with each other
Wedding tips: Start planning early. At least two months before d-day.
Honeymoon tips: Take her into your arms.
Romantic tips: Kiss and kiss again.

Below is a sample of a few of the 31 personal ads that appear right next to the insights quoted above. Frankly I found a third or so to be strange in some way. Some were looking for big age gaps, but none were guys looking for significantly younger girls. The ages requested are very specific.  A good number were single mothers looking for someone.  A full 5 ads, or 1 in 6, was a guy explicitly looking for an older “sugar mummy” – their choice of words.

-Sonia, 28, fair, beautiful, single mother in Kaduna, needs a man of 52-80 yrs for a mature relationship.

-Annie, 23, a nurse, fair, plump, in Asaba and Warri, needs a sincere, exposed and intelligent man of 30-43yrs capable of keeping a woman.
-Ola, 30, 5.5ft, dark, Moslem, in Lagos, needs a tall, Moslem, employed, genotype AA responsible man of 36-40yrs for a serious relationship. [Google tells me that this is in reference to sickle-cell anemia; is this common in Nigeria?]

-Leke, 31, single, driver, in Lagos, needs a sugar mummy who can take care of him financially. He's ready to satisfy her with love.

I don't recommend taking your eHarmony profile cues from these guys.

Arik Air: more legit than the average Nigerian e-mail

I will admit that I wasn’t sure what to think about the prospect of taking domestic flights on a Nigerian airline. However, Arik is surprisingly nice – they gave me a breakfast box, which is more than most U.S. carriers will do. The captain was, by his voice, obviously American. The plane was an older B737, but had gotten a few upgrades and facelifts along the way.

Somehow I'm guessing that it wasn't the people who gave him the nickname "People's Governor."

The airport, however, is another matter. I found the airport check-in humorous because, if I could have seen everything in black and white, I would have thought I was on the set of a 1940s movie involving a small-town airport. The “Terminal 2” sign hangs on a small tin-roof structure. I’ll have to take a picture sometime because I can’t do it justice. The sign saying “do not put valuables in your checked luggage” wasn’t reassuring – the equivalent of saying “we admit that our employees are highly likely to steal your stuff if given the opportunity.”

Benin has a tiny airport with a very efficient luggage system.  They toss your bag on those baggage carts just  like a regular airport, but then they haul the carts directly into the terminal and you grab your bag.  (I didn't check any luggage.)

Starwood point jackpot!

I connected to Benin via Lagos. During my night in Lagos I stayed in the most expensive hotel I have ever stayed in and paid for. (The only one that would top it, my night in a ludicrously luxurious villa in Phuket, was free.) The Sheraton is not bad, but it’s not up to U.S. Sheraton standards. Nigerian hotels of Western safety/quality are heinously expensive, because they are close to an oligopoly in this niche market – in the capital city of Abuja, for example, the Western options are a Sheraton or a Hilton. This means less than you’d get in the U.S. for close to double what I paid in a NYC W hotel.

The upside? Starwood points are accumulated on a point-per-dollar basis. The downside? They aren't connected to the Starwood computers (a few days with the infrastructure and you realize why), so I have to convince the people that I have Starwood preferred status.

A shot from the car.

Benin is hard to describe in words.   The part I have seen is pretty flat both naturally (topography) and artificially (no buildings taller than 4 stories -- not even the "Ritz Hotel").  It is lush and green, with plants continually threatening to swallow up everything man-made.  There are many more street vendors here walking among stopped cars than in SA -- drive-thru groceries may not have hit it big in the U.S., but here you could probably by all your basic grocery needs straight from your car during a half-mile drive.

Any permanent building has a wall around it, but tin and wood shacks line the edge of the road in the no-man's-land between the walls and the road.
 They are mostly stores, but some are houses.  I could pick up dresses (well, maybe not), Arsenal towels (or Manchester United if you are Bret), and all sorts of foods from the side of the road.  Or I could take a leak there.  I saw a BMW driver stop at a shack for something and then relieve himself against a wall nearby.  (Flashy cars are rare here, but they exist.)

Nigeria: not South Africa

The main foyer at Johannesburg's O.R. Tambo airport, decked out for soccer.

My first two impressions of Nigeria when I landed in Lagos were the faded airport carpet that said “Welcome to Nigeria” and the hit-you-in-the-face smell of body odor. (No travel guidebook will hire me now.) With lots of people in a poorly ventilated building and only a few room A/C units, you can understand why.

I won’t get to see a lot of this country for security reasons, so I don’t expect my understanding of Nigeria to be what I would like when I leave. Everything is free-flowing – the traffic is more so than Honduras, as is both the commerce and the law. Lane markers on roads are just wasted paint.  A blind guy could probably drive here, because everyone is always honking to let other drivers know they are there.  I am surprised at how nice my hotel is in Benin and how decrepit the client’s headquarters is.

My hotel isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s pretty clean, has a surprisingly good gym, and has working A/C. The power only goes out about 2x/night, and the diesel generator kicks in fairly quickly.

 An aerial shot of the outskirts of Joburg.  Everything is more brown here naturally, plus it is winter.

Learning from some 10 year expats

Some of you asked me about my expectations for my time in SA. Perhaps surprisingly, I did not expect to learn about BBBEE over a traditional Korean meal in an old Afrikaner house, but that’s what happened on Sunday.

I visited a church on in Midrand (halfway between Pretoria and Joburg) on Sunday and a few people invited me to have lunch with them. The hostesses were a Korean girl and her mom, and we drove out to their “plot,” as they call acreage. It was an interesting mix of cultures. The house was obviously an old farmhouse meant to be run by domestic staff, and it felt even larger and emptier with only two Korean women inside. This very Afrikaner house was decorated in a very traditional Korean style, and we had Korean food while sitting on the floor at low Korean tables.

A decent shot of both the landscape and the electric fencing.

The whole place is fenced with what looks like high exotic game fencing in west Texas. However, I suspected and confirmed that it was actually electric fencing. Despite the 7 ft electric fencing and the steel bars on the windows, they had been robbed twice during the 10 years they had lived there.

The girl just got her masters in BBBEE studies. She approached it more from the anthropology side – studying how it had been implemented and its effects – but I was still surprised that you can actually get a master’s in this. The more I hear about it, the more I realize that it’s like accounting – complicated, and something that requires professionals to basically audit/consult so you can figure out how you’re doing and what you need to do to get points.

Vuvuzelas aren't that bad -- provided you're the one behind the horn blowing it.

McKinsey coffee addiction

Two of my teammates on this project are addicted to coffee. One guy has a travel coffee maker, and this is what it took to convert a Swiss plug to a Nigerian wall outlet.

Three rings on one finger is a little excessive

So what do South Africans think of President Zuma? I have a sample size of three, but none think that Zuma is either good or will survive. His time has been marked more by personal scandals than any sort of accomplishments. One of his close business partners was convicted of having an improper business relationship with the president. As someone noted, it’s difficult for a relationship to be corrupt in only one direction, and usually the first person corrupted is the person with the power. Word is that the only reason he hasn’t been convicted is that he has used legalities and some strong-arming to keep his case from ever coming to trial.

He also had child out of wedlock – which is saying something, since he has three wives and is engaged to a fourth. (Polygamy is legal in SA.) That makes twenty total, in case you're counting.

Proud to be an American – and grateful

Consider this a delayed paean to the U.S., slightly too late for the 4th of July. I had to get extra pages added to my passport in order to get a Nigerian visa. While I was handling my passport in the office, one of my South African counterparts made some comment to the effect of, “Oh, a blue passport – the one that can take you anywhere." South Africans used to have trouble traveling because of apartheid, but I was surprised to find that they still have to get a visa for most places they go. Apparently part of the reason is corruption: you can (illegally) buy South African citizenship and a fully legitimate passport for a couple thousand U.S. dollars. (Zimbabweans were singled out as frequent purchasers of SA passports.) Because other nations don’t trust SA to properly police its own citizenship and passports, they require visas in order to do their own checks.

Oh, and those efficient German? It takes them a week to add pages to a passport. I got mine done in a day. Getting my driver's license to me is a different matter, though...

When just having a VW is showing off

To put the cost of living here in perspective, an average college grad fresh out of school will make R120K-R140K or $16K-19K per year. (Those numbers came from a discussion and I found some intro engineering salaries in that range.)

Contrast those with:
-If banking is about R2000/year ($270), that is 1.5-2% of a new college grad’s salary just for banking.
-A basic low-mileage used car (2008 VW Golf with 30,000 km, manual transmission, A/C) is about R150,000 ($20,000), or more than a year's full salary
-Gas is about R8/liter ($4/gal), filling up a small car with a 12 gal tank every other week could be about $1,300/year, or 7% of a new grad's annual salary -Each ride on the ubiquitous bus taxis is about R7 (~$1) – and since everyone who can owns a car, this means that substantial part of lower earners’ salaries is going to transportation.

Banking fees and a semi-cash society

Banking here redefines the phrase “to nickel and dime.” Banking isn’t free – around $250/year just to have a checking account for deposits/withdrawals and a debit card. You get charged on everything from deposits to checking your balance at an ATM. (An example pricing guide from one of the banks can be found here.)

Some of it makes sense – you get charged more when you do something from in a branch vs. doing it from an ATM, which reflects a bank’s higher cost of letting you interact with a human being. Others just make banking expensive. Usually the fee options are:
-Pay as you go
-Pay a flat month fee (about 170 rand or ~$22/month)
-Hold a minimum balance

Credit cards also charge a per-month fee, so I don’t think I will have any credit cards here (just the debit card that comes with my bank account).

This explains one thing I had noticed: SA is much more of a cash society than I had expected to find. I rarely see people using credit or debit cards. Now it makes sense: if I get charged to have a card and charged every time I use it, I’ll withdraw chunks of cash and use that little by little.

I’m not sure what percentage of the population has banking services, but it seems that having a large portion of your population out of the banking circles would be pretty bad for development. There are higher hurdles to moving money around, there is higher theft risk, and it’s harder for lower income people to save.

There is a small bank called Capitec that has taken a different approach and is growing rapidly. They have lower fees and branches mostly in more sketchy, poorer areas in order to win people who don’t have any banking services currently. They are offering about 7% interest on accounts in order to draw money, so I may try to use them.

Why cars are so expensive in SA, part 1

I've been wondering why cars are so expensive here, and I've found part of the answer: there is a 50-100% tariff on imported cars (with the tariff increasing with the retail price of the car).

However, this doesn't answer the question as to why lower-end cars that are made domestically are also so expensive.

University exams and relative hurdles

A discussion in the office turned to where people went to school and how you get into a school.  Admission here is almost solely your GPA – not like in the U.S. where it is rounded out by essays, etc.  There is a secondary national exam in that some courses (which count toward your GPA) have a national exit exam that determines what grade you get.

Schools have GPA hurdles to get in, but as I understand it those hurdles vary by gender and race.  Med schools are competitive, and it is most difficult to get in as an Indian female and easiest as a black female.  The way they do this is by changing the GPA hurdle – perhaps a 97 for Indian females and an 85 for black females.  Each year this is adjusted based on what sort of class the previous years’ hurdles resulted in.

I’m off to look for a female Indian doctor.

Some country music and some frontier law

Today I heard Lonestar’s “Amazed” on the radio and had a nice taste of home.

I also heard a story about a guy who was pulled over late at night. He deserved a couple fines, but convinced the police that it wasn’t a big deal and wouldn’t happen again. His argument was helped by 150 rand, or about $2.

I think that says a lot about SA’s mix of 1st and 3rd world. My impression is that police corruption isn’t systemic (no mass infiltration by drug gangs ala Mexico) and rarely proactive (I haven’t heard of the police shaking anyone down for fines or fees they don’t deserve, which would happen in other countries). At the same time you can sometimes get out of a legitimate traffic stop for almost nothing, and their former police chief (who was also a former head of Interpol) was convicted of corruption just a few days ago.

Fanatics in the stands instead of the fan zones?

The opening of Spain vs. Paraguay.

I’ve been watching most of the games from a fan zone at Melrose Arch. In my mind I compare it to the fan zone I hung out at during the 2008 Euro Cup and except for the Ghana/Uruguay game it comes up short. I think part of that is the physical constraints – it’s very hard to get there via public transportation and there is limited parking, the square with the screen has buildings around it and is only a fraction of the size of the Euro Cup fan zone, etc.

The "cause" of this World Cup has been racism, and the teams have all stood together and recited a pledge against racism before each game.

However, I also think the fan base that’s present is different from the Euro Cup.  Here, anyone (except expat residents) from another country spent good money to come down, so I think it’s safe to say that they came down to go to games – not hang out in fan zones.  I also think it’s safe to say that fewer fans from each country will come.

Paraguay's best chance at scoring was blocked.

At the Euro Cup more people could come from outside the host country (Austria) quickly, cheaply, and easily via European train.  In the fan zone I was sandwiched between younger guys about my age who were from outside Austria and weren’t going to the games but could still afford to hang out for the festivities.

I think the result is that the fan zones here have a higher percentage of locals who take a side but aren’t fully committed, whereas the Euro Cup fan zones had more, younger fans from the countries that were playing.

The agony of defeat.  While Spain eventually won, Paraguay certainly seemed to play with more heart, and the Spaniards barely got by.

Soundtrack of the World Cup

I found a classical and news radio station early on, which has been my haven in my car. Outside of that, however, 50% of all songs I have heard -- that sounds crazy, but it's approximately true -- have been one of two songs that are official or semi-official World Cup anthems:
Waka Waka by Shakira
Wavin Flag by K'naan

The lyrics to the K'naan one are worth reading through.

I was going to say you could listen to each of them once for free at lala.com, but apparently it bit the dust. I have this suspicion that Grooveshark is next.

Race and business

Race doesn’t end at sports, of course.  Getting blacks onto the field is one thing, but the real objective is to give them an economic leg up and power/ownership in society.

To that end, SA also has an explicit affirmative action policy called BEE (Black Economic Empowerment).  It has evolved somewhat into BBBEE (Broad-Based…).  This means that the government, when choosing any private company to deal with, looks at the BEE score when choosing a vendor.  Obviously, then, businesses want to have good BEE scores, particularly since according to the CIA Factbook the government expenditures are approximately 30% of GDP.  (Seems high to me, but I didn’t dig further.)

I don’t fully understand how it works yet, but you basically go through a survey about your company.  You get points for black ownership, points for blacks at different levels, etc.  (It was described to me as having different point values for blacks, coloreds, Indians, other Asians, and whites.)  You have to hit some point target to be “BBBEE certified” is my understanding.

There are so many BEE consultants that they have their own association:

http://www.nabc.org.za/

Two sites with overviews of BEE – I couldn’t find any actual BEE score forms with a quick search (which also means I could be wrong about some of this).

http://www.ghostdigest.co.za/code/A_919.html

http://www.beeconsultants.co.za/empowerment.html

World's 3rd worst commute?

Fortunately I haven't seen traffic that is absolutely terrible, but according to at least one survey I went to a terrible traffic city.

African unity

I watched the Uruguay/Ghana game last night at a fan zone. (Uruguay won in penalty kicks after the most exciting and nail-biting game I’ve seen.) It was the largest and loudest crowd I’d seen at this fan zone, and after the game the crowd was universally deflated whereas before there had always been a third of the crowd that was happy, a third that was sad, and the rest that were ambivalent and had just come to watch.

Lots of people moved their work to the canteen to watch the Brazil/Netherlands game on Friday afternoon

I totally underestimated the desire of all of Africa (as measured by SA, at least) to see Ghana get through. The Ghanian flags were everywhere, SAs were crying afterward, etc. It was pretty neat to see that.

I think it says a lot about how Africa views this World Cup. Yes, SA is the host, but to some degree it is seen as the “debutante ball” for all of Africa.

The doctor's office/I'll be Gone to Nigeria soon

I chose a project that is going to take me to Nigeria for a couple of months. Consequently I needed to go get a yellow fever shot.

I made an appointment and had three shots (I also got two boosters) and 50 days of malaria meds for approximately $120 straight up -- no insurance billing, etc. I was in and out in 20 min and filled out one piece of paper.

While my copay would have been less than $120 in the U.S., the total bill (i.e. my copay + what the doctor bills insurance) would probably have been 2x that, I would have filled out a lot more paperwork, and I would have waited 20 min to see the doctor.

(I also wish I could have recorded the female nurse's voice. "Mozzies," "jolly sick," and all sorts of other expressions.)

Race and rugby

South Africa’s recent history is intertwined with the topic of race relations.  A lunch conversation turned to sports and ultimately rugby, and to where an upcoming SA Springboks vs. NZ All Blacks match will be held, to rugby politics, and ultimately to race and rugby.

It turns out that rugby politics, run by certain rugby clubs (almost like college booster groups), is strong and perhaps more interesting than SA government politics.

Apparently SA’s young national teams (like Under 21 team) routinely win the world championship, and their makeup mostly reflects the SA population.  However, the teams in the top SA rugby league (Premier, I think, but I’m still sorting the different leagues out) are strongly white.  The national team is drawn from these top clubs, and thus is also predominately white.  My colleague bluntly stated that the entrenched powers don’t want blacks.

Also, the entrenched powers usually came through several schools known as rugby powerhouses – and that are predominately white.  The top teams end up recruiting from these schools – imagine if powerful Miami Dolphins supporters were mostly grads of Ole Miss and Auburn and pushed them to take as lots of people from those schools.  (Most of the black rugby players that make it to the top also went to these schools.)

To counter this, the league has explicit quotas on the number of black players a team must field.  (Do a search for “race” and “quota” on google.co.za and half of the top returns are about rugby and cricket quotas.)

In addition, there is a proposal to merge the two worst teams in the league of 12 and add a new team in a predominately black area.  This has been vigorously opposed by the rugby establishment, though one could argue for financial reasons as well as just race.

Another explanation (not discussed) is that these few schools give rugby players the edge they need to be the best, and that because of academics or some other factor they naturally accept mostly whites, and thus these schools are heavily recruited/the top league is white.

Race terminology

For the record going forward, SAs (including the government) separate everyone into one of four categories:
1) Black African
2) Coloured (black/white mix)
3) White
4) Asian/Indian

Let this be the disclaimer that if I refer to "coloreds," I am using official terminology.  I find it interesting that they are separated out.  I'm interested to see if they live in a "no man's land" in society.

Clarification: This post wasn't intended to say that SAs shouldn't use the term "colored" -- in fact, closer to the opposite.  I use it because it's the accurate, acceptable term in SA.  I posted this because "colored" now has negative racial connotations in the U.S. and I wanted any reader from the U.S. unfamiliar with South Africa to understand why I was using the term.

(That does not negate my question, though -- I'm still curious to see what they think about their place in a society that went from white apartheid to rule by the ANC, an organization that for most of its history accepted only black Africans.)

McKinsey Quarterly on Africa

The McKinsey Quarterly published a special report on Africa that contains a lot of interesting articles.  I'm not sure how much is available to non-subscribers, but you can check it out here.  The article on Making the Most of Chinese Aid to Africa is particularly interesting.

Another interesting McKinsey publication, this one almost entirely interviews and guest articles, is What Matters.

While I'm on a roll, check out two more great publications. Sure, I work for McKinsey, but I really like the truly non-aligned research (sorry Cato and Brookings) that we publish.  [Warning: bad puns ahead.]
-Charting our Water Future, which made a big splash at its unveiling
-Global carbon cost curve, which also made waves (but is from 2007)