Student uprising in Soweto 1976 when 500 young people and children were killed by the state

Neoliberals and Soweto

Thatcher’s other favourite among repressive regimes was apartheid South Africa, where her own family had business connections. Here too there was a tradition of neoliberalism going back into the 1950s, and here too we find Milton Friedman turning up in person.
 
In March 1976 Friedman informed a university audience at Cape Town that apartheid would eventually come to an end, not through voting, which was not, in his view advisable because it extended the vote beyond the wealthy few, but through the forces of free market capitalism.
 
Friedman’s visit came just in time for South Africa’s forces of conservatism. Three months later, 500 students were killed in rioting at Soweto.

The government’s response was gruesomely military. But also – extraordinarily – it borrowed heavily from Friedman’s neoliberalism. Instead of attending to the grinding injustice and poverty that was straining apartheid – and people’s lives - to breaking point, the government cut spending in Soweto.

There was an end to aid programmes and housing subsidies. The government had decided that the solution to Soweto’s deprivation was to be free enterprise.
 
What that meant in reality was transferring the economic problems of the black townships away from white government and onto the backs of private black businesses.

The townships would now, for example, get electricity. But only by private enterprise, funded by a levy on their poor inhabitants.

In reality, the white minority would now be able to hold on to power for many decades. Another triumph for neoliberal economics and Milton Friedman's version of freedom.