South Africa: the New Divide SIEGMAR SCHMIDT W hen you come back to South Africa after, say, ten years, the first im­pression might be: nothing has changed! The poor shacks in the townships Nyanga close to Cape Town International Airport and then a few kilometers further Khayelitsha with its hundreds of thousands of in­habitants form a sharp contrast to the beautiful middle and upper class villas of Somerset West. The traditional assumption of an Apartheid­induced division of South Africa into a white rich world and a poor black world seems to remain valid ten years after the political transition to majoritarian democracy. But a closer look reveals that change has oc­curred that contradicts the traditional view: there is electricity and basic infrastructure in most places in the townships and there are many new settlements and areas with new smaller houses around Somerset West with an increasingly multi-racial population. If this observation, which is in a strictly academic sense non-representative, has some significance, it would mean that there has in fact been a change in the well being of the poorer parts of society as well as in the class structure of the South African society. In this case, the political transition from Apartheid to universal suffrage has definitely had an impact on social stratification and the stand­ard of living of the poor. This article tries to show that the active welfare policy pursued by both post-Apartheid governments has had mixed results: on the one hand, it has been successful in improving the living conditions of millions of South Africans, on the other hand, up to forty percent of South Africans are still poor and the unemployment rate remains extremely high – be­tween thirty and forty percent – even though the economy has grown continuously since 1996. With respect to income distribution, the picture also is ambivalent: inter -racial inequality has been reduced, but intra ­racial inequality has grown considerably. African 1 middle and upper classes have emerged. Yet persisting inequality is unlikely to destabilize 1. The term African refers to black South Africans only. 148 Schmidt, South Africa: the New Divide ipg 4/2003