Maybe Jan van Riebeek is to blame for South Africa’s misfortunes.

Perhaps President Zuma is correct. The imposition of European norms on the African way of life has made progress and survival difficult for the Natives.

Two of the most affecting factors were Western medicine and land demarcation.

Until van Riebeek arrived, life in Africa was a leisurely and uncomplicated business.

Tribes would live off the land and move on to greener pastures once that particular piece was exhausted.

This gave the land time to recover, and it gave the tribe a relatively even standard of living.

The tribe never became an unmanageable size because the diseases common to Africa kept numbers down and the vast reaches of the continent kept them from having to fight one another for land all the time. They could fight each other for food or livestock, but fighting for land was a foreign concept.

If a tribe found their neighbors unbearable, they would simply move on to an empty quarter, or one with more biddable inhabitants.

The European settlers ruined all of that with their mania for demarcating land.

They would mark out the land into all shapes and sizes. Tiny plots in the towns for houses, huge ones in the country for farms.

Each of these plots had an owner who claimed exclusive rights of domicile.

This had the effect of narrowing down the nomadic options available to the natives.

While the grass was certainly always greener on the other side of the fence, that side was owned by someone who didn’t want you there, especially if you were a tribesman on the move from your last exhausted patch.

This narrowing down of options, together with the comparatively effective medicine offered by European missionaries, swelled the numbers in the tribes at the same time as their options for accommodation were narrowing.

Soon, the Europeans were parceling up whole countries with borders and restrictions of movement between them.

The Natives way of life was inflexible, but their circumstances were not.

They were essentially a consumer society that lived off the fruits of the land rather than being a producer society that manipulated their surroundings to provide a living for them.

The liberation from colonialism left the Natives with everything except the right to move on when they had exhausted the land. It also left them with modern medicine that swelled their numbers to unmanageable proportions.

True to their nomadic inclinations, the newly liberated Natives consumed everything left behind by the colonists, but, being unable to move on, and with swelling populations, had no option but to grow poorer.

So, Jan van Riebeek has much to answer for. He and his Eurotrash brought some habits to Africa that have endured, and in the absence of the Natives being able to alter their nomadic character, have doomed the continent to poverty.

The only way that Africans will be able to improve things for themselves is to become a producing rather than a consuming society.

The scorched earth nature of African lifestyle is already having a great impact on the effectiveness of Western medicine, so disease is at least thinning the numbers down, and where this is not happening fast enough for Mother Nature, she has ensured that massacres such as the Rwanda and Congo genocides take care of the amount of people she can support.

In South Africa, there is little evidence of a move from the nomadic consumer society to the producer way of living.

The Natives are spending their energies carving up the European riches into smaller and smaller portions to divide among themselves.

This mis-direction of energy, guarantees that everyone becomes poorer over the long run. The neglect of education further ensures a transition to a producer society will not happen.

So while the country gallops back to the bush that is still constrained by the borders the Europeans installed, the only hope for a sustainable future for its inhabitants is disease and civil war to keep the numbers to where Mother Nature can keep supporting them.