Today is Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, to which guests have been asked to “wear full day ceremonial dress without swords.” Remember when we blogged about Margaret Thatcher’s terrible legacy? Read it again here and here. We were emphatic that “Africans don’t remember Margaret Thatcher fondly.” Well, we were wrong. Some Africans do like Margaret Thatcher. Here’s a […]
Post by Jonathan Faull and Sean Jacobs Apathetic liberal hearts in South Africa (and some in the mainstream media) will beat a little faster, but fleetingly, for the cause of “Agang” (‘Let us build’ in Sesotho; though some claim it means something else completely), the new political platform launched earlier this week by Mamphela Ramphele, to […]
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 […]
Cape Town’s local politics seems to be getting more and more distressing. Last week the Rondebosch Common, a public plot of open land in the leafy suburb of Rondebosch in Cape Town showed a bit more activity than usual. Cape Town’s city council – run by the Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s official opposition with 16 […]
I swore I wasn’t going to add a thing to the discussion about the idiotic poster campaign by the student/youth wing of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance about a future non-racial love-fest. I have remained shtum (yiddish for ‘quiet’) about its horrid aesthetics, its awful family snap-shot quality. (Some have claimed it’s like a Benetton […]
South Africa’s Democratic Alliance, usually very slick and media savvy, have really outdone themselves with a new campaign by its youth wing. Fresh out of leader Helen Zille’s troublesome ‘AIDS Gestapo’ views and calling the ever disgruntled musician Simphiwe Dana a “Professional Black” on Twitter, the DA now give us this poster, above.
Just as South Africa is recovering from the havoc wrought by former President Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism, now there’s a new politician spouting all sorts of nonsense – this time it’s Helen Zille, the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance. She’s been active on Twitter and in the media, calling for the criminalization of HIV […]
Occasionally we have to promote our day jobs. Here are some excerpts from an op-ed that occasional AIAC blogger Herman Wasserman and I wrote last week for a South African publication on the latest manufactured scandal by the opposition Democratic Party (not to say that the ANC can’t avoid scandals)
In my previous life as a South African political analyst, I would spend long hours on the telephone to a ‘political risk analyst’ in New York, working for a major international investment advisory group. The conversations were not always easy, and much of my time was spent rebutting base assumptions that South Africa was the […]
For at least 3 years now South African photographer Lizane Louw have chronicled the lives of the people of Blikkiesdorp (translation: Tin Town), a temporary relocation camp in Delft–not to be confused with the Dutch town and one of the poorest townships in Cape Town, located about 30 km from the city center. Life there […]
