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  A shipwreck in the Transkei, South Africa  

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Uploaded: 09/23/03 6:52 AM GMT
A shipwreck in the Transkei, South Africa
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There's an interesting story behind this wreck. Apparently, it's an insurance scam: The ship was wrecked on one of the only strips of sand for miles around, it crashed pointing towards the beach, and all the crew got off safely. However, the real bit of genius goes something like this: At the time of the crash, South Africa's apartheid regime was in full swing, and the government had split the country up into seperate states, or Homelands. All people from the Xhosa tribe were told that they now lived in two areas, one of which was the Transkei. If they wanted to go into "main" South Africa (such as the bits where most of the jobs were, and where they often already lived, anyway) then they needed a permit. Similarly, they were more-or-less allowed to do what they liked inside the Transkei. Hence the idea of respectable, white, upper-class insurance investigators travelling into the Transkei to look at a shipwreck was rather unappealing, and so the insurance company paid up without investigating. Apparently.

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