AfricaIs aCountry

The news from South Africa

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The news from South Africa

By
Marissa Moorman

...or the constant deferral of reconciliation

Last year we declared March White History Month.

This year it seems South Africa is in a hurry to get there.

Jared Sacks pointed out the logics of the Democratic Alliance’s move to rename Cape Town’s busiest highway, the N1, F.W. de Klerk Boulevard (despite the vociferous protests of the ANC and others).

Eugene de Kock, aka “Prime Evil,” the handmaiden to De Klerk’s duplicity in the treacherous 1980s, will receive parole this year, despite a sentence of two life-terms plus 212 years. But as De Kock himself has noted, he was jailed, rightfully, while others walk free with blood all over their hands.

The point about political elites being free while their henchmen serve time, suffer PTSD, and do the hard work of dealing with the violence they wrought, has been made again and again. The image of forgiving black South Africans, ruined Afrikaner scapegoats, and free-wheeling elites is getting old. How much more privileged reconciliation without justice can South Africa take before the rainbow fades?

Achille Mbembe put it this way recently in a Facebook post: “As long as South Africa does not put in place a set of coherent anti-racist laws, with institutional bodies endowed with robust investigative resources, deracialization will not happen. Racist incidents will not decrease. The cost of being racist has to steeply increase if any progress has to be made on this front. Unfortunately, the ANC seems to have lost the plot. Intellectually and morally bankrupt, it has dropped the ball insofar as racial justice is concerned. The new elites are happy to sleep in the former master’s bed, as Fanon rightly predicted.”

The bottom line is this: the ANC has made a pact with capital. All bets about when racial justice and equality will be delivered are therefore, sadly, off.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.