“South Africans live in separate but parallel worlds, and old divides continue to exist, 16 years after the end of apartheid, while new ones are opening up…the process of increasing the positive and diminishing the negative is a slow and incremental one,” writes Ullrich Fichtner. It’s still deeply divided and violent, but the country’s rising black middle class provides some hope. “In the surrounding front yards, families are barbecuing. People are mowing their lawns or washing their cars, hardly taking notice of the police. They are members of a group that is relatively new to South Africa: the black middle class.”