South Africa

South Africa: Coloured and Black Africans Regina Brown March 26, 2009 After years of black Africans fighting racism in South Africa, now white students there are claiming that the government is discriminating against them. And now, they’ve decided to protest in an unusual way. Students in Pretoria blacken their faces to protest what they see as the lower status of whites in modern South Africa. Students registered as Africans with the South African department of laborsaid that it gives them a better chance of gaining employment. People are being driven to the point where they are thinking that there is no option left. They are being discriminated against. They have to leave the country and see whether they can make a living for themselvessomewhere outside. The students have appealed to everyone born in the South Africa to register for employment as African, rather than other options white, coloured or Indian. Being an African just gives you so much more privileges, and it has come to a point where if you are not an African, then you are treated as a second class citizen. South Africa experienced 46 years of white rule during the apartheid era. The country’s first multi-racial elections took place in 1994(McGill, S.). The ban's terribly disparate impact on poor women also constitutes a special invocation to the church. God has a special concern for the poor not because of their virtue but because of their suffering, because they are the ones who are being sinned against. The most important political task of the church is to tell the truth. It is to analyze political policy, to expose its consequences for the poor. Since it is African women whom apartheid has disempowered most acutely, the church should focus most particularly on those policies that cause suffering among African women, including the abortion ban. The church's muteness, combined with the apartheid government's use of so-called Christian principles, has also contributed to other minority faith...