Presented by Sipho Singiswa this episode looks at the impact the mining companies have on the environment and people living around the Lonmin mining operations — with a particular emphasis on children. Community leader and activist Chris Molebatsi says that what the people want is respect from mine owners. If there was respect for the […]
News/Politics
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
When will apartheid victims be compensated?
June 26 is the anniversary of the signing of the Freedom Charter. It is also International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. The Freedom Charter is an aspirational document which focuses mainly on freedoms “to” and “of”. One subclause speaks directly to freedom “from”: “The privacy of the house from police raids shall be […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Spare a thought for Madiba’s doctors and nurses
If I had to choose the way I could die, I would probably like to go peacefully in my sleep. It seems that Nelson Mandela no longer has that option. He may have had, and perhaps even been on that trajectory when he was rushed to hospital in the middle of the night more than […]
Posted inNews/Politics, Tech
Planet hunting for second Earths
It’s days like today that I miss the Greek and Roman pantheons. It was the golden age of star, planet and galaxy naming. Mars, Saturn, Andromeda … they were myths written across the skies. These days, it’s a collection of someone’s name, numbers of letters – thoroughly unromantic … unless of course there was a […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
In captivity, in life and approaching death, we stalk Mandela
In a previous incarnation (what seems like a lifetime ago in a distant land) I worked as a journalist; as a reporter, a news photographer, a sub-editor and then as a political correspondent. The brief period that I worked as a news photographer coincided, loosely, with some of the darkest days of the late apartheid […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
On hatred and forgiveness
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, his unrelentingly bleak vision of humankind in thrall to a merciless totalitarianism, George Orwell relates how his mythical State of Oceania compels all its citizens to observe a daily “Two Minutes Hate” ritual. All citizens are required to watch a film denouncing the designated enemies of the all-powerful Party and work themselves […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Will SADC let Swaziland descend into war?
Last week Wednesday Swaziland woke up to shocking news of a 28-year-old activist who was sentenced to 85 years in prison after confessing to a spree of petrol bomb attacks that targeted mainly police officers and government officials. We all missed the story because Swaziland only makes headlines when King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Post-blackness and what it means for African unity
By Melo Magolego Every so often, a chorus of scribes invokes the memory of Nkrumah to remind us of the urgent task of uniting Africa, both politically and economically. The 50th anniversary (in 2013) of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) — predecessor to the African Union — proved yet a stage for another hymn. […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Sarah Palin has her once-in-a-million-year Hamlet moment
One always knew, as with the averred statistical likelihood of a million chimpanzees with a million keyboards in a million years eventually producing the equivalent of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that it had to happen. Now after a lifetime of effort, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has at last said something intelligent. Palin, who has […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Whose land is it anyway?
It’s no secret, 100 years later and we are still living with the effects of the 1913 Land Act. While watching the news clip with President Jacob Zuma opening yet another exhibition “commemorating” the Land Act, the idea of marking the dispossession of land an occasion to be commemorated by exhibitions makes me wonder about […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Cyber warfare
In The Information Bomb (Verso, 2005, p. 62), Paul Virilio says the following: “ ‘He who knows everything fears nothing,’ claimed Joseph Paul Goebbels not so long ago. From now on, with the putting into orbit of a new kind of panoptical control, he who sees everything – or almost everything – will have nothing […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Malema the new King Shaka?
With elections lurking, developments in the political scene have created a political conundrum for the poor and disenfranchised: do they vote on loyalty or for change? The recent announcement of new political entrants, particularly Mamphela Ramphele’s Agang and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters, has meant the poor have new choices to make. With due recognition […]