This piece, below, on the politics of the South African opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (led by Helen Zille, above), was written by Jane Duncan (a journalism professor at Rhodes University) well before the recent local government elections in South Africa, but has a shelf life far beyond that result: The DA under the leadership […]
Perspective on 2011 SA Local Elections
May 19, 2011 By 2 Comments
If you’re tired of the nonsense published in The New York Times or on the BBC website about yesterday’s local elections in South Africa or can’t bear the spin that will come from ANC (this points to widespread approval of its current leadership) or Democratic Alliance spin doctors (tripling your vote from 2% to 6% […]
Animal Farm
May 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
In Cape Town this January, Ken Salo invited Jessica and I to presentations by summer abroad students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They were presenting their findings on urban inequalities in the city. A group of students presented on the struggles of a group of residents in Delft, a working class township, who […]
This is Freedom
April 27, 2011 By 32 Comments
In Helen Zille’s Western Cape, MTV is currently filming, “Clifton Shores,” a reality TV series about a group of mostly white, young people (four Americans and three South Africans “who serve as their guides to life in a new country”) predictably working for an events company and “having fun” in Clifton, a wealthy district of Cape Town on the other side of Table Mountain. The producers promise that Cape Town, “… a new and exotic location for US audiences,” has “European style and African spirit in equal abundance,” and that the show “… will showcase the glamorous lifestyle of Cape Town’s rich and fabulous.”
Freedom’s in the Toilet
April 12, 2011 By 4 Comments
Ahead of local government elections in South Africa–scheduled for May–the Democratic Alliance, which governs Cape Town and the Western Cape, spins about its “service delivery successes.” Of course they’re taking of downtown Cape Town and its surrounding, historically white, suburbs, but tell that to the country’s mainstream media. The truth is the DA’s electoral successes […]
The Uprising
February 22, 2011 By 8 Comments
“The Uprising of Hangberg” is filmmaking at its incendiary best. Part agitprop piece, testimonies, campaign document, and popular history, the film recounts the violent events of September 2010 when municipal police on the orders of the Cape Town’s Democratic Alliance (DA)-run council invaded the favela on the edge of the Hangberg mountain in Houtbay, outside Cape […]
Public Toilets
March 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Residents of a shack settlement in Khayelitsha–that’s an area of cheap housing and squatter shacks about 20 miles from the Cape Town’s city center –”were provided communal toilets by the City of Cape Town on condition they built their own enclosures.” Basically a few communal toilets without walls. Serious. Several residents told a local newspaper […]
Extreme Makeover
March 12, 2010 By 3 Comments
So Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the last leader of the racist National Party (that was the party who invented Apartheid and governed South Africa from 1948 till democracy came) is the favorite for the United Nations’ top climate post, as director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and to force industrial nations to hopefully […]
WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM 2010?
November 11, 2009 By 1 Comment
Just as the football at the 2010 World Cup will be great, someone will make lots of money. It is not going to be local businesses for sure. This excellent 13 minute short documentary (“Trademark 2010″) for Dutch TV channel, VPRO, covers the fantasy that local people–small businesspeople, informal traders–will make money or get jobs […]
