[rshnotsecure]

1979 was also the year Rhodesia ceased to exist as a country. A decade before that, to the west in Namibia, Peter Thiel would attend boarding school while his father supervised the extraction of Uranium from the enormous Rössing Mine for SA's covert nuclear weapons program.

I also want to point out that South Africa is a significant country in the history of computing. Chris Pinkham would spend 4 years their building AWS (albeit on US-hosted machines). I have never figured out why exactly that was done. However Jeff Bezos name is really Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, with Jorgensen being a very common SA surname.

Really the role of South Africa in the world today is deeply underestimated. Thiel's close confidante Roelof Botha ... the grandson of a former SA Secretary of State as well as Prime Minister ... is one example.

Also the Chinese/SA owner of the LA Times Patrick Soon-Shiong, the invention of organ transplant tech, Evan Spiegel of SnapChat (similar to Elizabeth Holmes he spent a year at 19 doing a genetics internship, but his was in SA instead of Singapore).

Lastly, if anyone has read the sequels to the book "Space Odyssey: 2001", you will remember that South Africa becomes a world power equivalent to the US/USSR. Always found that very interesting and a surprising outlook on the future.