Dirk Coetzee was one of an infamous group of police and law officials responsible for some of the apartheid government’s most egregious human rights violations, ranking among the likes of Eugene de Kock (known as “Prime Evil”) and the apartheid Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok. I read the announcements of his passing over […]
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 […]
It has recently been announced that Roland Joffe, (Londoner and) director of films The Mission and The Killing Fields has cast Forest Whitaker to play Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his upcoming film. In an adaptation of Michael Ashton’s play inspired by the events at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the film — titled […]
Like many other mainstream publications, National Geographic Magazine’s June 2010 issue (out May 25) will host a feature on South Africa. The feature is entitled, “Mandela’s Children” (titled for Mandela’s comments when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993: “It will… be measured by the happiness and welfare of the children”) and is completed […]
In Argentina members of that country’s military dictatorship that conducted a “dirty war”) against its people way back in 1978 still go to jail for their crimes (this week actually), while in South Africa Apartheid’s generals and government ministers get amnesty and fat pensions, holiday homes in Wilderness, mansions in Pretoria’s suburbs, find Jesus and […]
Twenty years ago today Nelson Mandela walked free from a South African jail. He had served a 27 year long prison sentence at the head of a mass movement opposed to Apartheid I still remember that day like it was yesterday. I was watching it with my family. The long wait, the useless commentary of […]
Democracy Now! in New York City reports last week on the historical case in a New York City court by black victims of white minority rule in South Africa (not everyone bought the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s line), against several international corporations accused of aiding the Apartheid regime. The victims’ lawyers are seeking up to […]
