What needs to fall to what needs to rise
The video playlist from our one-day symposium marking the 10th anniversary of the Marikana massacre—funded by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—is now on YouTube.
South Africa
Character assassin
Author RW Johnson's latest aberration is a mix of fiction and lazy research that misrepresents anti-apartheid struggle leaders.
Selling fencing as freedom
What happens when companies start to sell the idea of a frictionless consumption that helps people at the same time?
The Cape Colony
The campaign to separate South Africa's Western Cape from the rest of the country is not only a symptom of white privilege, but also of the myth that the province is better run.
Through the lens of queer Indian South Africans
Queer Indians are largely invisible in South Africa's LGBT discourse. But representation is not enough, we need political transformation and multi-racial class solidarity.
Don’t mobilize, organize
To rebuild, the South African left must realize that there are no shortcuts to power.
Royal succession in the age of social media
New Zulu king Misuzulu's strategy for ensuring the relevance of his monarchy copies from the Windsors in Britain: use the media.
What’s wrong with the South African Institute of Race Relations?
Surveys on race by South Africa’s Institute of Race Relations (IRR) are deeply flawed and cynically used. Its influence on mainstream politics is significant and dangerous.
KwaZulu-Natal Gothic
The crime drama 'Reyka' looks at violence in the troubled South African province.
A new Zion
The spread of Garveyism from the US to Africa was as much about political liberation as it was religious salvation.
Rise of the reactionaries
AfriForum is no longer on the political fringe in South Africa, rather it's key in perpetuating increasingly mainstream, right-wing populism.
Reading List: Melinda Ferguson
The award-winning South African author Melinda Ferguson takes us through a selection of books exploring freedom, death, truth, as well as psychedelics, which can be a route to pondering such big questions.
Dispossessing to deliver
In South Africa, land occupiers are evicted from their homes in the name of housing delivery. On the Africa Is a Country Podcast this week, we attempt to understand why.
The slow cancellation of the future
Anxious and isolated, living in poverty or financial precarity, we sink into ourselves and adopt self-destructive coping mechanisms.
The quiet violence of child maintenance
Humiliation and stigma are companions for women seeking assistance from courts to obtain maintenance in South Africa.
Sleepwalking into fascism
That reactionary politics today lack a mass character is what makes them so dangerous.
Tiptoeing across the minefield of neutrality
Recent US-South Africa relations appear to be firmly stalled in the cul-de-sacs of imperial or sub-imperial diplomacy.
The land and the sea
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
The gossip bros
The age of the podcasters as thought leaders—think #PodcastandChill and The Hustlers Corner—is upon us.
Where laws and guns cannot reach
South African poet Don Mattera, who died in July, was the real deal—preferring to throw his lot in with the ignored and the undervalued. Unsurprisingly, his monumental life and work is undervalued too.