Beyond apartheid: South Africa's long journey: it's still a bright spot on a troubled continent. But South Africa is facing tough realities 14 years after the start of majority rule.

• Author: Bearak, Barry
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

A dusty maze of concrete, sheet metal, and scrap wood, Diepsloot is like many of the enormous settlements around Johannesburg: mile after mile of feebly assembled shacks, an impromptu patchwork of the poor, the extremely poor, and the hopelessly poor.

Monica Xangathi, 40, lives here in a shanty she shares with her brother's family. "This is not the way I thought my life would turn out," She says.

Her disappointment is not only with herself, but with her country. Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa--the global pariah that became a global inspiration--is feeling gloomy and anxious about its future.

"If only I could make Nelson Mandela come back," Xangathi says of the man, now 90 years old, who led the struggle against apartheid and became the country's first democratically elected President in 1994. "If only I could feed him a potion and make him young again."

This longing for the past is rooted in more than nostalgia.

The past year has been especially unnerving for South Africans, with one bleak event after another in a country long considered an example of progress. Economic growth has slowed; prices have shot up. Riots have broken out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners, many from neighboring Zimbabwe (see p. 17), and chasing thousands more from their meager homes. A vicious power struggle recently ousted the President and has added political turmoil to the mix.

And longtime problems continue to pose enormous challenges, starting with AIDS: About 20 percent of adults, almost 6 million people, have HIV/AIDS, which accounts for half the country's deaths.

South Africa also has one of the highest crime rates in the world, and it's a major reason for the increasing "white flight" that is robbing the economy of many of its professionals. But just as alarming as the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting.

In defense, the poor apply padlocks. The rich surround their homes with concrete and barbed wire--and there are signs that more are simply fleeing the country.

"On our street alone, just that one small street, three of the husbands in families were killed in carjackings or robberies," says Antony McKechnie, an electrical engineer who moved to New Zealand over the summer. "If we had stayed and something had happened to any of our three children, we would never be able to forgive ourselves."

A 'YOUNG, MESSY' DEMOCRACY

The complaints of rich and poor, black, white, and mixed race may differ, but the discontent is shared. Polls show a pervasive distrust of government, political parties, and the police.

For much of the 20th century, a white minority ruled South Africa under apartheid, a government-run system that segregated blacks from whites and...