Will South Africa’s unemployed rise up?

Beginning in the year 2000, Robert Mugabe began snatching white-owned farms for ‘redistribution’ and giving them to the black majority in Zimbabwe. The best properties were given to ministers, generals and retired ambassadors. Many used them as weekend retreats from the city. Mugabe’s wife, Grace, took a vast citrus estate east of the capital, Harare.

In a short time, a country that for half a century had fed itself and exported the surplus was bankrupt, and hungry.

The president’s plan was not so much about agriculture as politics. Young people in the city voted mostly for the opposition. He would put them on five- or ten-acre plots way out of town where they couldn’t join in strikes and riots and they would stop telling journalists that even with their O or sometimes A levels, they couldn’t find work.

Today, many of the farms lie empty and an estimated three million have jumped the border to South Africa where locals say they are taking jobs and driving up rents in townships around the cities. There’s