News/Politics

By Dr Unni Karunakara The current emergency unfolding in and around Somalia is being portrayed by many aid organisations and the media in one-dimensional terms, such as “famine in the Horn of Africa” or “worst drought in 60 years”. But only blaming natural causes ignores the complex geopolitical realities exacerbating the situation and suggests that […]

By Ayanda Sitole City Press’s attempt to appease the public by reporting that the incident in which self-titled Facebooker “Eugene Terrorblanche” posed over a black child in a hunting pose, was a family “joke”, is seriously disturbing. The provocative image, published on the front page of last week’s Sunday Times, showed an unnamed white male […]

At the occasion of the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony of 1960 at Oslo University in Norway, in his acceptance speech, Chief Albert Luthuli highlighted a fundamental challenge that still confronts Africa that “our continent has been carved up by the great powers. Alien governments have been forced upon the African people by military conquest […]

By Fiona Snyckers Some recent attempts by the media to condemn Constitutional Court Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng on the basis of certain carefully excerpted snippets from his judgments have placed me in the parlous position of seeming to side with those who would go easy on the perpetrators of violence against women and children. As a […]

The African National Congress’s (ANC) decision to charge youth league president Julius Malema and the punting of the Protection of Information Bill, which is to be put before Parliament for debate — while seemingly unrelated — are both manifestations of the same malady afflicting the ruling party. The discussion in both Johannesburg and Cape Town […]

It is inescapably true that the asset base of the white community benefited directly from – within living memory – depriving others of property and the right to trade to acquire property. 



By Joseph Dana There is an old joke about two stocky Austrian men walking down a street in Vienna. One of the men turns to the other with an open newspaper and says, “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” Slovenian philosopher Slavoj […]

By Jan Radley I was amused by the humour and irony in a recent Madam and Eve cartoon. The contention was that Malema is responsible for much of what is wrong in South Africa, a notion which was tested without success in the particular cartoon. One can only hope that the amount of publicity bestowed […]

By Adam Wakefield South Africa has one of the world’s highest Gini coefficients, a measure of disparity of wealth. Placed second behind Namibia in 2005 (according to the CIA World Factbook), while much has changed in South Africa in the following six years, a disproportionate number of South Africa’s citizens still live in poverty. If […]

The 30th of August – 30 BC – is the day on which Cleopatra the famous seventh queen of Egypt committed suicide. Apparently, she deliberately poked an Egyptian cobra until it was so angry it bit her. In Shakespeare’s version of the story – Anthony and Cleopatra – Cleopatra died holding the snake that bit […]

By Nobukhosi Ngwenya I had the pleasure of being in the company of a number of the country’s unsung heroes this women’s day. The Robben Island’s Public Heritage Education department organised a woman’s day celebration with a difference. They brought together the nation’s unsung heroes of the apartheid era — women. Their contribution to the […]