Who is an apartheid beneficiary? Anyone who was classified “white” under apartheid benefited from the system. Do we include their children almost two decades after apartheid was officially abolished? The answer must be yes. It is the moral stance. (German youth were faced with a similar dilemma. It took time. The first generation after World […]
apartheid
Posted inGeneral
Helping stir South Africans’ consciences
That most complex economic relationship — between domestic helper and employer — is well scrutinised in The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s New York Times bestselling book that is also a film with the same name. The Help depicts the usually fraught relationships between women who worked as domestics and those in whose homes they worked in […]
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Racism in schools: a teacher’s perspective
By WR Terblanche Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying […]
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“That’s what you get when you mix with the blacks”
By Charles Leonard Every year on this day I think of my riot policeman – the one who tried to kill me the day then-president FW de Klerk announced the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress, and that he was going to release ANC […]
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1994 to now: How did we get here?
By Balt Verhagen In Who am I? Kopano Matlwa Mabaso chronicles her hopes and bitter disappointments since 1998 when she started high school. This prompted me, a person three times her age, to recount some of my own experiences during the same period when “we were well settled into our new democracy”. Around 1998 I […]
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The problem is not black and white
It was 1994 and a Canadian comic at a South African festival thought that given our apartheid history, he’d be edgy by poking fun at race. He got mere titters and derisory silences from the audience. He didn’t realise: we got race. We South Africans had been through race, come back and turned it inside […]
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Substantive, not normative equality is what we need
By Elsabe van Vuuren In 1994 South Africa rejoiced at the ordination of a new government. South Africans also celebrated the end of deeply unjust apartheid laws. This was a new beginning for Southern Africa. South Africa joined its neighbours, namely Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia and, Zimbabwe in the fight for more equal opportunities for […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Arch Makgoba: Secrecy bill evokes memories of apartheid, fear
By Archbishop Thabo Makgoba Dear Mr President, I write to you as one who grew up under a system that oppressed and censored the media — a system that invoked fear in anyone who dared to read, or embrace, different views to those of the government of the day. The passage of the Protection of […]
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I am an apartheid beneficiary. I am not proud of it
Background: Last Sunday I published a letter in the Afrikaans Sunday paper Rapport addressing one Dr Marie Heese. Heese had written a scathing attack of my colleague Prof Pierre de Vos’s views on the so-called T-option language policy at Stellenbosch University. De Vos’s commentary was sparked by a motion by a doctoral candidate in law […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The secrecy Bill: Why wearing black matters
Sanef, the National Press Club and the Right2Know campaign have issued a call to wear black on what has been dubbed Black Tuesday: when Parliament votes on the Protection of Information Bill. It’s a cause that has resonated with many, and there’s been plenty of discussion on social media platforms; #POIB and #SecrecyBill are top […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Challenging the narrative in Israel/Palestine
Next week, a group of young Palestinians will board Israeli settler buses in the West Bank with the intention of traveling to East Jerusalem. The activists will likely be greeted by fully armed Israeli settlers, as well as soldiers. The threat of Israeli violence has not deterred Palestinians who maintain that they are prepared to […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Black journalists’ role in the struggle needs to be re-examined
It was 34 years ago that the apartheid regime mounted its assault against the freedom and integrity of so-called black newspapers. On October 19 1977, the government silenced the World and Weekend World publications, which were mistaken for revolutionary voices simply because of the skin colour of the staff and the racially segmented market they […]