South Africa's Current Political System Research Paper

South Africa's Current Political System - Research Paper Example In order to understand the relationship between South Africa's diversity and its contribution to the nation's position as an emerging economy, it is worthy to look into the political history of the country and how it links up to South Africa's current position in the past 15 or so years. South Africa has had five different constitutions since 1910 (Klug, 2010). This can be traced to the 1902 Boer War between the British settlers and other European settlers of Dutch origins [Afrikaners] (Klug, 2010). Although Black South Africans fought in the Boer War, they were excluded from the negotiations that came up afterwards and this led to the creation of a constitution that guaranteed rights to the British and Afrikaners. Later on, laws that segregated the White minority [of about 10%] and the Black African majority known as Apartheid led to a system where Blacks were kept as a servant caste in the nation (Segal and Cortm 2011). Apartheid led to a situation where the Whites with links to Eu ropean nations and the United States, used laws to promote a capitalist idea of industrial growth, mining booms and agricultural productivity (Lowenberg and Kaempfer, 1998). This caused South Africa's economy to boom in the period between 1948 and 1994 when Apartheid was entrenched in the society. The link between the White minority and the developed world led to the investment of Western capital into the economy. This also allowed South Africa to export and make a lot of money and build strong world-class infrastructure (Feinstein, 2005).