Our annual publishing break coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Marikana massacre. We are planning a public event on August 20th to reflect on its legacies.
Latest
The afterlives of Marikana
Why do representative bodies like the union, the party, and the so-called Left seem to fail its constituents during struggles like Marikana?
Confronting police power
Accountability—insofar as it ever existed within the South African Police Service—has been reduced to a merely theoretical concept. It is time this changed.
Where do trade unions go from here?
In South Africa, the seismic shifts in unionism triggered by the Marikana Massacre have sadly not resulted in a union movement better equipped to tackle the issues that workers face.
Dreaming of the green blanket
The impact of the Marikana massacre on South Africa’s student movement for free education, and an end to outsourcing, has been overlooked.
The new imperialism’s strange bedfellows
Africa’s political liberation and economic emancipation can’t be one-country affairs, but pan-African combined with international solidarity.
Marikana, 10 years on
August 16th, 2022 marks a decade since the "Marikana Massacre." Ahead of a one-day symposium on August 20th, streaming online and in person at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, we invited various authors to reflect on Marikana’s legacy.
Why do representative bodies like the union, the party, and the so-called Left seem to fail its constituents during struggles like Marikana?
Accountability—insofar as it ever existed within the South African Police Service—has been reduced to a merely theoretical concept. It is time this changed.
Culture
We are all potential advocates
Director Shameela Seedat’s film about trainee lawyers provides a sort of celebration of youth on this continent and a vision of the next generation of Africans.
Bookends: Chinelo Okparanta
The Nigerian-American author of the novel “Harry Sylvester Bird” talks to the Radical Books Collective ahead of her appearance at their book club.
Warsan Shire’s prayer for the unmourned
The British-Somali poet Warsan Shire’s audacious yet uneven volume of poetry captures the quiet loneliness of African immigrant lives in the West.
Reading List: Patrice Nganang
The novelist on 3 books he returns to: by Wole Soyinka, Ibn Khaldun, and a third on the history and the system of writing of an early 20th-century Cameroonian king.
Divided by the word
Why languages, particularly black African languages, have become a battleground in postapartheid power and identity politics in South Africa.
PODCAST
On this week’s AIAC podcast: After an upswing before the pandemic, the global climate justice movement currently looks stuck. What kind of climate politics can appeal to the majority of people?
Politics
Tricky coalitions
The challenge presented by Argentina: What is the best way to deal with global fiscal pressures in a local context of high expectations and public demands?
Lula can set the bar higher for a new presidency
Lula’s challenge in Brazil: To be successful with proposed reforms, he’d need to take back the anti-systemic appeal stolen by the far-right.
What does it have to do with Marikana?
The Marikana Massacre changed democratic South Africa forever. It can also catalyze resistance to the current order.
AMLO’s way
Mexico’s president has a mandate for radical change, but this change must be negotiated within a context of limits produced by the neoliberal period itself.
A post-neoliberal road to socialism in Chile
While Chileans have defeated the post-authoritarian neoliberal regime, they face major obstacles on the road to a post-neoliberal social democracy.
Academy
Did dependency theorists really ignore culture?
Must indigenous knowledge be science to be valid? Philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji shows that we must ask why Africa is scientifically and technologically dependent in the first place.
The doctor from District Six
The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.
Is the academic boycott of Israel a violation of academic freedom?
A decision to rescind an invitation to Israeli academics to a conference in South Africa, revived a tactic of the anti-apartheid struggle. Is it effective?
African liberation and African scholarship
The Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies in Accra in August 2023 foregrounds the struggle against African Studies as a form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside Africa.