News/Politics

Of course we cannot feel pride for what we witnessed in Alexandra in the last couple of weeks. Hanging our heads in shame and writing lamentations will not change what has happened. We could express our dissatisfaction at what appeared to be a lack of leadership. We could even say that Thabo Mbeki spoke up […]

Elmy is crying and shaking. She’s a fifty year old Somali woman who lost her children and husband in the civil war that plagued her home country. (For a short overview of the war in Somali watch this Youtube report.) Elmy came to South Africa ten years ago in the hope of forging a new life, but following the xenophobic violence everything she has is gone. Burnt and looted. Like the dream she had for starting over. “I beg President Thabo Mbeki to let me go. This government allowed me to come here. They let me into this country. Now they must please let me go home.”

In every political culture, there’s a favourite construct, a sort of Pavlovian bell that is designed to trigger the immediate cessation of critical thought. In South Africa, it’s “the workers” or “the people”. The workers want, the people demand: appeal to this amorphous entity and people will vote for you. In America, Dubya likes to […]

There have been active developments across the borders of a number of Latin American countries since 2004 to form what was seen as a regional forum for, among other things, the social inclusion of these countries’ different nations. Last year, during the first ever South American Energy Summit, held in Venezuela, twelve Latin American countries […]

If there is one certainty in the American Presidential elections, it is that none of the candidates of either party can ever stand watch on the walls of beleaguered cities, peering through the darkness infested by every multinational company imaginable…and do so in the name of the American working and middle classes. Their vigil keeping, […]

The crisis is not over, despite official statements claiming it to be so. What the army has done was to drive the attacks underground, resulting in war parties of five to seven thugs combing through settlements, picking foreign nationals out one by one. No system of community policing can be successful without the concerted co-operation […]

‘Decency’ is one of the most overused and abused words in the English language. It is a word that has emerged in two events to capture the attention of Sydneysiders in recent weeks. One of them, a police raid on an art exhibition featuring photographs of nude adolescents, has drawn stark lines between the anti-child […]

Submitted by Cynthia Ayeza Mutabaazi Most of us have by now read a lot about the current xenophobic attacks on “foreign” people/non-South Africans in South Africa. We have read about it in the papers, seen it on television, heard it on radio and the internet continues to carry the story across the globe. I do […]

If you live in Johannesburg, spend a night in a trauma unit in one of the city’s public hospitals. It will change you.

When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, they passed the infamous Enabling Act, which effectively gave them the power to deviate from the constitution and create the dictatorship that we all know so well. Within four months of implementing that act Adolf Hitler had his one party state. Zimbabwe in turn […]