The irony is South Africa gets painted such a villain for apartheid by the world. There is no denying that apartheid was a flawed system based on prejudice and misunderstanding. Nothing anyone says can ever justify it.
That being said I would like to point out a couple of other realities that will maybe put everything in a different light.
If you look at colonization done one behalf of Europeans in the middle ages, I will mainly be focusing on English speaking imperialists, it is an inhumanly savage and barbaric affair.
Genocide was committed against both the Native American and Australian Aborigine populations. It was legal to hunt and run down Aborigines as late as the 1970s. (will link source in edit). I recall seeing a picture of a necklace of human ears hanging on a door, Aborigine ears.
When South Africa was colonized there wasn't as wide spread fighting. The only genocide that was committed in that period was by Shaka's 'Scattering' where it is estimated he murdered between 1-2 million people from other tribes.
I guess this piece kind of sums up a lot of what I am saying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHO1a1kvZGo
What really irks me is that at least under apartheid there was no pretense. (meaning the government enforced what it believed in even if it was a very flawed ideology) In America the situation is arguably even more dire than it was during Apartheid in South Africa.
http://inequality.org/racial-wealth-gap-worse-thought/
(will find more sources)
In other words with 'freedom', black Americans are worse of than Apartheid era black South Africans when compared relatively to their white country men.
That fact alone is enough to destroy any illusion of progress we as a society might have made.