You just beat me to it.
It's like Stirling wanted to write something about South Africa, didn't know anything about it, and was just too GOD-DAMN LAZY to learn anything. So he just pulled some shit out of his ass and smeared it on the page, then threw in some lesbians and hoped to god that that pulled the book through.
Awful. Awful stuff.
At least The Year The Cloud Fell was imaginative and leaves you feeling uplifted. The Draka series just leaves feeling like you've wasted your time and you're never getting it back.
Have never read the Draka books, but have heard enough about them on this site to put me off them for life.
As a South African I get pissed off that it is automatically assumed that whites in Africa automatically becoming frothing racists who hate any other race.
A former member, Diamond, who ironically was banned in The Great Purge which followed Stirling's banning from this site, wrote a good "counter-Draka" timeline, where the USA became a Giant Evil Empire (TM) and European colonists in SA created a liberal, democratic non-racial society.