Undoing apartheid? From land reform to credit reform in South Africa

Both land and credit in South Africa - the twin bases of apartheid - proved to need reforming when that country gained its political freedom. Both proved problematic. Land reform was charged with remedying all the problems of apartheid, but people had little wish to return to a forgotten rural past. Instead they desired upward mobility and a modern lifestyle, of a kind that only access to credit could deliver. Although the state was able to deliver democratic freedoms, it could not—in a newly liberalised economy—deliver the means necessary to enjoy the life of the free person: only borrowing could do that. Curbing it would require not only that ‘reckless lenders’ stop extending loans but also that ‘reckless borrowers’ stop availing themselves of these. But if lenders operated by the logic of the self-regulating free market, then why was state regulation required to restrain them from offering products that were leading borrowers into penury?