Twenty years after freedom, South Africa remains a survivor of its past and wounded by the unsound ambitions of its current leadership. Mandela had sharp words for the neo-liberal direction in South Africa, but also for the general tenor amongst the managers of the world economy. In 2005, he went to the G8 meetings in the U.K. and made it clear that “where poverty exists, there is not true freedom. The world is hungry for action, not words. In this new century, millions of people in the world’s poorest countries—including South Africa—remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free.” Where would this freedom come from - by constraining the rights of property to feed untrammeled off of social wealth? Poverty, like apartheid, is man-made, so it can be unmade by man. The rich, he said, must feed the poor.
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