Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
In conversation with South African author and activist Rebone Tau
Few national liberation movements loom as large in the politics and history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as the African National Congress (ANC). Founded in 1912 as an association to advocate for the rights of (...)
We are once again being told that “there is no alternative” to austerity – the cutting of expenditure to address debt during economic downturns. The general public is being forced into “disaffected consent” to the current status quo, on the basis that we don’t have a choice. This has been (...)
This blogpost is about a new social movement, the C-19 People’s Coalition (C19PC) that has developed in South Africa in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Activist and researcher, Kate Alexander examines the Coalition’s Gauteng Community Organising Working Group. She highlights the issue of hunger (...)
’From colonialism to apartheid and through to contemporary South Africa, it is the threat presented by the masses which means they need to be permanently contained, and this remains the enduring imperative of policing practices.’
The latest round of protests against police violence in the Unites (...)
In November 2018, the coastal Amadiba community on the Wild Coast won a historic legal victory in the South African High Court, which ruled that the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) could not award a mining right without the consent of the community.
The campaign around this legal case (...)
We will emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic into a global economic crisis and mass unemployment. South Africa was already in an economic recession before the pandemic. We have had mass unemployment for years. We have had more than 14 million people going to bed hungry. Now, everything is set to (...)
In 2018, newly appointed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s inaugural State of the Nation promised what would in effect be a presidency of Summits. This address promised a variety of marquee events meant to signal the state’s ability to attract investment, “develop” the nation and create jobs. These (...)
Andrew Chirwa is the president of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). This statement was issued today as Covid-19 infections in South Africa continued to rise and raises criticisms of President Cryil Ramaphosa of the African National Congress. NUMSA’s workers were in the (...)
This analysis was written by the Khanya College and the Gauteng (province) Community Health Care Forum and published in the Karibu! newspaper in Johannesburg, South Africa. Karibu! is a working-class newspaper whose coverage ranges from combating xenophobia to a focus struggles for social (...)
South Africa’s official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is reeling from self-inflicted political damage.
Its newly elected parliamentary leader John Steenhuisen recently appealed to his colleagues to “stop the political hara-kiri that’s going on in the DA – pulling out entrails to (...)
The 2012 Marikana mine massacre
In 2012 thirty-four protesting miners employed at the Marikana platinum mine were massacred by police repression. They were in a hard fought struggle for wage increases. They had nothing left to lose because at the demand of creditors the mining company was (...)
Shocking revelations that about R4million had allegedly been spent by Crime Intelligence to spy on the EFF adds pressure on Parliament to speed-up the probe into the intelligence slush fund.
According to The Star’s sister paper, The Sunday Independent, millions from the intelligence slush fund (...)
The election of a new government should be a time of celebration. 25 years since the end of Apartheid should be the time of immense celebration. Yet, 25 years since the “dawn of democracy” and South Africans are engulfed by extreme forms of anger, disillusionment and alienation. 22 million adults (...)
Public debate about gangs doesn’t really grapple with why ganging practices and cultures have been a part of the fabric of South African society, at least since the union of 1910.
For working class communities on the peripheries of South Africa’s urban centres, gang violence is part of daily (...)
Amid mass unemployment and soaring inequality, voters in today’s South African election are getting sick of the ANC’s broken promises. But there’s no real alternative for them in sight.
Twenty-five years since South Africa’s first democratic election, the country reels in anxiety. Poverty levels (...)
In South Africa ten members of a militant shack dwellers organisation have been assassinated in the past six years. Yet many progressive organisations have distanced themselves from these militants. Jared Sacks exposes the complicity of a mainstream NGO that could have played an important role (...)
When 1,700 vulnerable and mentally ill people were moved from specialised care facilities to unlicensed organisations in a bid to save money, nearly one in 10 died
In September 2016, Phumzile Motshegwa received a call from an unknown number. The woman on the end of the line said Motshegwa’s (...)
S’bu Zikode leads a shack dwellers’ movement and says city officials crack down on those who highlight a housing crisis.
New York, United States - S’bu Zikode, the leader of a shack dwellers’ movement in Durban, South Africa, said he received a tip-off from police in July that he was being (...)
The Constitutional Court, the highest court in South Africa, has ruled that an employer cannot employ a worker for more than three months without a permanent contract.
NUMSA members demonstrate against labour broking outside the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg early this year. NUMSA (...)
Freedom Day is an annual public holiday in South Africa to celebrate the anniversary of the country’s first democratic election in 1994. The euphoria of that moment is now a distant memory. To many the promise of a truly democratic future marked out in the Freedom Charter of 1955, and even the (...)
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