Police and power in South Africa
South African policing is a tool of social control and repression. Are democratic and humanistic alternatives possible? This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss.
South Africa
The politics of pathology
By using healthcare to attack immigrants, xenophobic political movements in South Africa echo long-standing right-wing obsessions.
We need to talk about wage theft
South African companies can afford to pay their workers a living wage—if not for their commitment to profit shifting, as the case of Lonmin and Marikana showed.
Apartheid of a special type
The Israel/Palestine system meets the definition of apartheid in international law, but presents different challenges for the campaign against it than was the case for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
The Bisho March and the Leipzig Option
Revisionist histories of South Africa’s transition to democracy are overdue, like on the deadly march on Bisho in the Ciskei homeland on 7 September 1992.
Denouncing the reader
Zoë Wicomb thinks she knows why black South African readers appreciate Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel 'The Promise' (2021) whilst many white readers were turned off by it.
On safari
For the 10th anniversary of the Marikana massacre, we are planning a public event on August 20th to reflect on its legacies.
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.
Killing the collective
We know an enormous amount about what precipitated the 2012 Marikana massacre, but relatively little about what is behind the violence there since.
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.
New dawn or false dawn?
South Africa’s ruling party’s devotion to its policy of cadre deployment is an indication that it values its own power more than the public interest.
Divided by the word
Why languages, particularly black African languages, have become a battleground in postapartheid power and identity politics in South Africa.
The Stay At Home Strike
Before the Soweto Uprising in 1976, students and workers organized one of the largest strike actions in South Africa’s history.
Reading List: Nicky Falkof
What happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends, and other paranoid narratives when they manifest in a place like South Africa?
Nelson Mandela and the revolutionaries
The ANC and Nelson Mandela’s turn to violent anticolonial struggle in the early 1960s, is the subject of a new book by historian of South Africa, Paul Landau.
Instrumentalizing migrants
From Operation Fiela to Operation Dudula, xenophobia in South Africa is bent on protecting the interests of politicians.
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.