Where does South Africa go from here?

TO TRAVEL AROUND Durban last week was to witness scenes of wholesale devastation. Shopping centres were ransacked, with nothing left but decapitated mannequins lying amid broken glass. Torched factories smouldered, the smell of burnt materials wafting on the breeze from the Indian Ocean. Not that one could escape into the water. A noxious spill, thought to be from a scorched chemical warehouse, had closed the beach.

Elsewhere a humanitarian crisis was spreading. Queues for food snaked for ever. The main motorway into the city was closed after dozens of lorries were set alight. The country’s largest factory making anti-retroviral drugs was up in smoke. Vital supplies of bread, pills and nappies had to be flown in from Johannesburg. The city that hosts one of Africa’s busiest ports looked like the site of a natural disaster.

As in the case of America’s Hurricane Katrina, the carnage revealed much about the country in which it occurred—except that in South Africa the disaster was entirely man-made. In particular, the worst violence since the end of apartheid puts a spotlight on the party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress (ANC). Its failure to build a properly functioning state and to deliver economic growth created the potential for chaos. Its own factional battles set the timing. The effects of the...