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Poverty and protests will haunt us in the unproductive age of the shopping mall

Last week, the residents of Eldorado Park, south of Johannesburg, went on the rampage, looting shops and causing mayhem on the N12.

We were told the protests were due to unemployment and a shortage of housing. But this is not entirely true.

The protests were solely about unemployment. People who have jobs don't protest; they get their own houses.

The pictures we saw on TV are of young black people in their 20s and 30s. During the week such youthful energy ought to be expended in a mine or factory that produces things. When unemployed, youthful energy is dangerous.

We know that there is unemployment in SA today, but we hardly focus on how it came about. In other words, who has been employing black people in South Africa, and where? Why is this former employer no longer employing us today?

Since the advent of modern mining in the last quarter of the 19th century, white people have been employing black people.

We black people have no history of creating mass employment for ourselves. We don't know how to build a mine.

Now that this bitter truth is out of the way, we must trace where and how white people have been employing us in order to understand why they are no longer employing us today.

In summary, modern SA has gone through three stages of employment: the age of the mine; the age of the factory; and the age of the mall.

The age of the mine was inaugurated by the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1867, and was accelerated by the discovery of gold in 1886.

The massive scale of mineral deposits beneath our soil immediately triggered an inflow of capital to South Africa, mainly from three European capitals - London, Paris and Berlin. American capital also pumped in. The name Anglo-American captures the story.

We could say the age of the mine in South Africa lasted for a hundred years - from the 1860s to the 1960s. During this period, a black man looking for employment did not loot a shop or cause mayhem on a freeway. There was work for him underground.

Historical epochs don't hand over the baton on clearly marked points as in a relay race. By the time the age of the mine began to show its decline, the age of the factory had long been taking root. It was inaugurated by the establishment of Eskom in the 1920s, which unlocked the steel industry in the Vaal, spearheaded by South Africa's best industrial organiser: Hendrik van der Bijl.

From the 1940s to the end of the 20th century, millions of black South Africans flocked - under conditions of influx control - to the Witwatersrand and other industrial centres for employment in factories.

It is the age of the factory, combined with agricultural subsidies from the state, that finally solved the historic conundrum called the "Poor White Problem", which mainly affected Afrikaners.

Again, during the age of the factory, black people did not have to loot shops when they needed employment; white-owned factories gave them jobs.

While we black people were busy celebrating political freedom after 1994, a new phase in our economy was setting in - the age of the mall.

Look around where you live today, there is a shopping mall nearby. Such is the age of the mall. The towering monument to this new age is the monster called the Mall of Africa in Midrand, Johannesburg.

Malls don't create employment on a massive scale as mines and factories do. They employ a few poorly paid tellers and cleaners to collect money from the rich and the poor alike.

The problem is that the clothes and smartphones we buy from the mall are not made in South Africa. They are made in China or South Korea. This is why the youth of Eldorado Park are jobless.

In today's age of the mall, we must expect more shops to be looted. The shortage of housing will be used as a convenient scapegoat.

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