have bought and sold license examination papers, and the chief of civil
aviation himself bought a dubious pilot's license.lOS An American medical
journalist described her visit to South Africa in May 2000. "Everyone I
met warned me to be careful. One acquaintance spent ten minutes listing
all the people he knew who, in the past six years, had been shot, killed,
raped, or who had been hijacked in their cars, robbed, thrown into the
trunk, and then deposited naked by a roadside ....
Crime in South Africa
affects everyone, black, white, Asian, rich, and poor. Last year someone
walked off with an entire automatic teller machine that had been installed
inside a police building in Johannesburg. In Cape Town, rapes and bur-
glaries have been committed by members of Parliament, within Parlia-
mentary buildings themselves. The sense of suspicion and paranoia
seemed to me to pervade even the fancy shopping malls, tourist beaches,
and expensive hotels." 106
After describing South African education as in crisis soon after he as-
sumed office, education minister Kader Asmal made positive forecasts
from time to time. In January 2000, he vowed to improve the matricula-
tion pass rate by 5 percent a year, and in February he promised to break