The Washington Post covered the power shortage with a delightful piece on the reversal of roles between Sandton and Alexandra since the end of apartheid: the latter now received power when the former was blacked out.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200802290199.html
I've yet to see anything by an American correspondent even faintly approximating Fred Bridgland's dispatches from hell in Glasgow's Sunday Herald [above in this thread]. Before recanting, Bridgland used to believe Unita's Jonas Savimbi would save Africa. Now he writes about SA as if it were a cross between Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno.
US television screens have yet, as far as I am aware, to be graced by anything along the lines of No More Mandelas , the BBC Panorama segment in which correspondent Fergal Keane confesses, with a certain theatrical sorrow, that his high hopes for SA have been dashed. The temptation to skewer ANC president Jacob Zuma as a sort of sub-Saharan Tonton Macoute, to which Keane succumbed, has thus far been avoided on this side of the Atlantic.