South African actress/singer/writer Masello Motana has had a career in the entertainment business that many would envy. She has played a leading role in a number of South African television shows as well as in a mainstream feature film. Her poems have been published in several anthologies in that country and she regularly amazes audiences […]
When legal apartheid finally ended in 1994, South Africa’s new democracy faced one overwhelming challenge: to improve the lives of the country’s poor, or at least to maintain the hope that the future would be better. Yet with an enduring global economic recession, it can no longer be denied, not even by the eternal optimists […]
I’ve been puzzled and not a little disturbed by the lack of empathy on South African social media with the horrific events at Marikana, where 34 protesting miners were killed by police on August 16th. Yes, someone has posted a few links here, a few comments there, but given the magnitude of this event, and what […]
Struggles over memory are commonplace in contemporary South Africa. The 1980s are an especially contested part of its past. That decade witnessed a mass resurgence of popular struggles that picked up a thread of civil opposition going back to the 1976 Soweto uprising. From outside South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) stepped up its armed struggle and sanctions campaigns; inside the country the United Democratic […]
Yesterday, Goodman Gallery emailed a press release to its huge recipient list, announcing a “joint settlement with [the] ANC.” After closed meetings, conducted in “order to establish common ground and a basis for resolution” in which all parties strove “to strike a balance” between maligned factions “in a spirit of amicability,” the Gallery felt it […]
Last week, after Malema was expelled from South Africa’s ruling party, we went back and looked at our archives to see how we’ve blogged about him and his politics. Here’s a sample.
Nelson Mandela elicits divergent, incorrect and unrealistic reactions among his detractors and supporters.
On Thursday, the Al Jazeera English program, “The Stream,” discussed the 100th anniversary of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress or ANC. I was a guest on the 30 minute live show. It proved to be a lot of fun, though technical difficulties meant we did not often hear the other guests.
UPDATE: The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) keeps bringing it. This is not the handwringing of The Daily Maverick passing for insight. Most of the op-eds on the site go over the heads of the people its intended. Others dismiss it as partisan or ideological because they can’t take the truth. Recently they […]
