Nelson Mandela sold out black South Africans. Now there’s a sentence you won’t have heard in the days since his death and that you won’t be hearing at his memorial tomorrow. Yet it’s incontrovertibly true that after centuries of being robbed of possibly the greatest mineral wealth the world has ever known, not to mention decades of being repressed by apartheid, black South Africans got almost no compensation for what should rightfully have been theirs when the old regime was swept away for the new South Africa.

Indeed, the basic deal Mandela struck from prison with F.W. de Klerk, and which was subsequently enshrined in the South African constitution, essentially guaranteed the existing property rights of white South Africans in exchange for an end to apartheid.

For whites, the deal made sense. Apartheid could not be maintained forever against international pressure and internal resistance. The odds of holding onto the material benefits of the oppressive traditional system were much higher with black African enfranchisement than without it. A successful revolution would lead to the dispossession of whites, just as it had in almost every other corner of formerly colonial sub-Saharan Africa. What Mandela was promising was more than half a loaf. It was a whole loaf of wealth with a proportionately small loaf of political power.

For black South Africans, especially supporters of the African National Congress who had idolized Mandela during his 27-year imprisonment, the choice was much harder.