Category: South Africa

Where Flowers Find No Peace Enough to Grow: The Thirty-Eighth Newsletter (2021)

Leave a comment

23 September 2021 — Tricontinental

George Pamba South Africa New Brighton Port Elizabeth 1977 2Milwa Mnyaluza ‘George’ Pemba (South Africa), New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 1977.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research.

On 13 July 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopteda landmark resolution on the prevalence of racism and for the creation of an independent mechanism made up of three experts to investigate the root cause of deeply embedded racism and intolerance. The Group of African States pushed for this resolution, which had emerged out of global anger over the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020. The discussions in the UNHRC considered the problems of police brutality and went back to the formation of our modern system in the crucible of slavery and colonialism. A number of Western countries – such as the United States and the United Kingdom – hesitated over both the assessment of the past and the question of reparations; these governments were able to remove the requirement to investigate systematic racism in US law enforcement.

Continue reading →

Likely Assassination of UN Chief by US, British and South African Intelligence Happened 60 Years Ago Today

1 Comment

18 September 2021 — Consortium News

New evidence over the past decade has led to a UN probe into the probable assassination of the second UN chief, but U.S., British and South African intelligence are rebuffing UN demands to declassify files to get at the truth.

Dag Hammarskjöld arrived in Katanga for talks with Katanga authorities and Belgian representatives about withdrawal of Belgian troops and the deployment of the UN Force. At Elisabethville airport prior to his return in Leopoldville. Aug. 14, 1960. (UN Photo)

Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general  “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”

Continue reading →

South Africa: Not even the dead

Leave a comment

17 September 2021 — New Frame

Our history of violence accumulates into the present as time slips by, and taints the future too. There must be decisive action against all political murders, old and new alike.

South Africa is one of the most violent countries on the planet. We have the highest rate of rape recorded anywhere in the world. The murder rate here is the 10th highest in the world, as is the rate of suicide.

Continue reading →

Marikana: The Struggle for Breath and Dignity

Leave a comment

26 August 2021 —  Internationalist 360°

Bonile Bam

31 July 2021: Former mine employee Bongani Mpofu says life in Marikana is hard for its impoverished residents. (Photographs by Bonile Bam)

The Marikana area in North West province may be rich in platinum group metals, but the profits from mining them do not benefit residents, who have little hope of improving their lives.

“We are dying slowly in Marikana,” says Bongani Mpofu, 31, who lives in the North West province mining town’s Maditlokwa shack settlement. “The carbon monoxide that comes from underground by way of ventilators that are positioned in the veld blows in the direction of the community.

Continue reading →

South Africa: The dangerous collapse of non-racialism

1 Comment

30 July 2021 — New Frame

Transcending the colonial fabrication of race is a radical idea. Now, as opportunists whip up hatred, South Africa needs to restore this emancipatory horizon.

15 April 2017: A mural by Faith 47 of anti-apartheid activists and proponents of non-racialism: from left, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Zainunnisa Gool and Iman Haron. (Photograph by Frédéric Soltan/ Corbis via Getty Images)

The death toll in the recent riots and the campaign of sabotage that accompanied them is now said to be at more than 330. National attention has overwhelmingly focused on Phoenix, the largely Indian and working-class township in Durban where 16 deaths have now been recorded. This has generated considerable focus on the relationships between Indian and African people.

Continue reading →

Johannesburg in decay

Leave a comment

11 June 2021 — New Frame

South Africa’s largest city is a world city, the home of jazz, art, politics and insurgent popular aspirations. But it is in precipitous decline, making now the time to act.

“What’s the word Johannesburg?” Gil Scott-Heron asked in 1975. An answer came the following year when children in Soweto ran into fascist bullets, their hearts full of courage and resolve to overcome oppression.

Johannesburg – Joburg, Jozi, eGoli, eRhawutini, Gauteng, Maboneng – is a city of gold, lights, barbed wire, jazz, the sun setting into lava, the burnt orange of aloes in flower against dry grass, a great university, men with guns, shopping malls, the sudden malachite of parakeets on the wing above the city forest and the smoke from the braziers hanging low in the shack settlements when winter bites. Its paths are strewn with lumps of quartz, its rivers and rain poisoned and its jacarandas overwhelmingly beautiful in October.

Continue reading →

Leader of shack-dwellers’ movement arrested by South African police for ‘conspiracy’ to murder

2 Comments

7 May, 2021 — Peoples Dispatch

George Mqapheli Bonono, the deputy president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, was arrested on May 4. The movement maintains that it is a politically motivated attempt by the police to discredit the organization at the behest of the ruling ANC

George Mqapheli Bonono addressing the AbM’s heritage week celebration in 2019. Photo : New Frame

Continue reading →

EXPLAINER: What does the new policing bill say about restricting protests?

Leave a comment

13 April 2021 — NetPol

Protester arrested during Extinction Rebellion protests in London, October 2019PHOTO: Splento

Since the confrontational crackdown by the Metropolitan Police on women holding a vigil for Sarah Everard at Clapham Common on 13 March, a growing movement has condemned police intolerance to the right to protest and warned this will only become worse with the passing of the government’s 307 page Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

So what exactly does the bill propose?
Continue reading →

South African movement adopts Climate Justice Charter

Leave a comment

2 September 2020 — Climate & Capitalism

Movement Building

Mass grassroots campaign calls for system change now and for a climate justice deal that ends the suffering of the most vulnerable and oppressed

Click image to download Charter (pdf)

“As Africans, we live together on a vast and beautiful continent where the human story began. All of us are linked to the first human who walked upright, dreamed, thought and co-existed with plants, animals, rivers, oceans and forests. Today this common humanity and its future is in serious danger. South Africa cannot ignore this challenge. The continued use of oil, gas and coal to power our economy and society is making our world unlivable for all life.”

Continue reading →