Mark Amstutz

A Professor at Wheaton College

Interviewed by Julian Portilla, 2003

This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

My reading of it was that the unemployment rate in still hovers at over 30% and so they've had a major crime problem and the transition has gone relatively well. One of the sad things is that frequently foreigners, outsiders, third-partiers, they get interested in these issues, so there was a great deal of European and American interest in South Africa at the height of the apartheid era. There were all these campaigns in the United States in the investment and sanctions in the mid '80s. Once the democratic transition begins in South Africa, this European and American interest in the fate of the South Africans really wanes and what you find is, as a matter of fact, is far less foreign direct investment proportionately today in South Africa than let's say in the early 1970s. And the same thing is true, for example, when the Central American crisis was going on, you had all these Europeans that where involved and invested in the justice process, but when the elections return and the conflict quiets down, the people just look elsewhere. One of the problems is that there hasn't been the international community, generally the developed countries, have not focused on the well-being of, as I think they should, of job creation in South Africa.