What’s Ahead for South Africa

Ken Salo grew up in Cape Town, South Africa and compares living in apartheid era South Africa to what he imagines it would have been like to live in the Jim Crowe era South in the United States. He attended a segregated university there and says what you could do and where you could go was dictated by whether or not you were black, white or colored.

This hour on Focus, we’ll hear from Salo about the racial issues that Nelson Mandela spent his life and career confronting and what it was like to be confronted with them as a young man in daily life. Host Jim Meadows also talks with Teresa Barnes, who lived in South Africa for 25 years and studies the country’s political and social history.

Ken Salo is a lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Teresa Barnes is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies, Associate Professor of History, African Studies and Gender Women’s Studies.