The Fire this time

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

In 1963 James Baldwin prefaced and ended The Fire Next Time, two essays on race in America, with a lyric from a song composed by Africans enslaved in America: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time!’ In the Christian reading of Genesis God ‘set the rainbow in the cloud’ as a sign of a divine covenant that the elect, chosen to survive the flood that had cleansed the world of human evil, would never again have to confront the rising waters. But those who turned from the path of righteousness would, in a moment of final reckoning, perish in fire.

Collaborators and the riven truth behind Zuma’s Nkandla

Jacob Dlamini, Business Day

IN 1879, the British destroyed the Zulu kingdom, putting paid to one of the last major precolonial polities in southern Africa. To hear white supremacists and apologists for the British Empire tell it, the defeat of King Cetshwayo’s army marked the triumph of European enlightenment over African barbarism; to hear Zulu and African nationalists tell it, the destruction of the Zulu kingdom signalled not the end of Zulu political sovereignty but the beginning of a pan-African struggle against white rule.

Timbuktu: Another Epic Zuma Fail

Vashna Jagarnath, The Con

On the first day of 2015 Times Live published a piece titled The Sands of indifference bury Mbeki’s Timbuktu dream. It detailed another epic failure of Zuma’s presidency. The article explained that Zuma’s government has dumped the Timbuktu Trust that was set up by President Thabo Mbeki. It declared that the dissolution of the trust, through which, “South Africa channelled its aid for the preservation of priceless documents and artefacts, marks the final chapter for one of former president Thabo Mbeki’s proudest legacies.”

Riot Police in Parliament

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

When the ANC raised Jacob Zuma above the rule of law and the scrutiny of parliament they repeated, on live television, an aspect of the logic with which the subaltern classes are routinely governed. The democratic rights that have been enjoyed by the middle classes over the last twenty years are frequently denied to people who inhabit zones, like the former Bantustan or the urban shack settlement, where different rules apply.

Poor-bashing is the new slut-shaming: Zuma, Sisulu & the lazy nation

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

I don't know of a country that gives free houses to young people. Free housing in a few years will be something of the past. (Young people) have lost nothing (to Apartheid). If it is not clear - none of you (young people) are ever going to get a house free from me while I live. - Lindiwe Sisulu If I am wrong, come and tell me which country did as we did. Once we were free we said our major focus is to address the plight of the poor. In no country in the world have you seen government giving people houses free of charge because they are poor. - President Zuma

Verwoerd, Zuma and the Chiefs

By William Beinart, Custom Contested

It may seem mischievous to suggest that Jacob Zuma’s thinking on chiefs and traditional authority echoes that of the infamous apartheid leader H.F. Verwoerd. But, oddly enough, the two men had similar decisions to make about the future of rural South Africa, and the path Zuma is choosing is not all that different from the one his white predecessor trod.

Empty promises to rural people

The land restitution bill is not the game-changer that President Zuma promised, write Nomboniso Gasa and Nolundi Luwaya. Sunday Independent

The Land Restitution Bill approved by the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Thursday may raise a cheer from traditional leaders, but it is not the game-changer that President Jacob Zuma promised in his State of the Nation address last year.

Zuma and his Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, punted the bill as a second chance for the Khoi, San and Africans who were dispossessed before the notorious 1913 Natives Land Act redesigned the South African landscape.

Provincialism & Retribalisation

Mazibuko Jara, The Con

Another outcome of the 1994 political settlement was the break-up of South Africa into nine provinces largely coinciding with ethnic and language boundaries. In my analysis, the creation of these provinces has diluted the goal of building a united non-racial South Africa. As a result, tendencies to provincialism, regionalism and ethnicity have been entrenched and in the future they may become centripetal forces against national unity.

Chris Vick speaks to Proffessor Suttner about the political effects of the Cosatu rupture

‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’: A new introduction

No Easy Walk to Freedom

by William Gumede, Pambazuka 

The first thing that strikes one as one reads the pages of Nelson Mandela’s speeches, letters and transcripts collected in ‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’, is that he and his generation of ANC and ANC Youth League leaders were political giants compared with the current cohort. During the “dark times” [1] of apartheid, the Mandela generation was far more visionary, intellectually astute, open to new ideas and far wiser.

Someone who occupies a position of authority and holds and exercises power is not always necessarily a leader. Leadership is about the quality of an individual’s actions, behaviour and vision. During the “dark times” of apartheid and colonialism, the Mandela generation offered a kind of leadership which was apparent in the quality of their actions.

Fear and Loathing in the ANC – Part Two

It is almost a year since President Jacob Zuma swept to the leadership of the African National Congress for the second time at its national elective conference at Mangaung. Zuma’s margin of victory cemented his hold on the oldest liberation movement on the continent and also concretised a new way of political organisation and patronage within the political party that had developed out of its Polokwane conference five years earlier. In the second part of this series first published in Rolling Stone magazine, Niren Tolsi emerges from the mushroom cloud that was Mangaung. The Con

“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

Neither the Irishman nor I was in death throes, floundering in a pool of vomit and blood after a relentless five days in Mangaung in December last year.

Fear and Loathing in the ANC

by Niren Tolsi

A year after the African National Congress held its national conference in Mangaung, which returned president Jacob Zuma to its top position, The Con republishes a two-piece special that examines the Fear and Loathing in South African politics which first appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.

Shit. Why Not? If Marry-Wanna presents herself, you can’t refuse the dance.

Especially if, at that moment, the cops are gathered upwind around a police Nyala ten metres away in one of the most securitised parts of the country.

Insouciance demanded it. Even if it was kak Limpopo majat.

 December 2007. Everyone who matters in the African National Congress (ANC) is in Polokwane for the elective conference that will see Jacob Zuma rise to the party’s presidency.

The Regulation of Protests under Jacob Zuma - Jane Duncan 7 May 2013

The Regulation of Protests under Jacob Zuma

by Professor Jane Duncan

Faculty of Humanities Seminar Room
5:00 p.m. 7 May 2013

Death by a thousand pinpricks - South Africa’s ever-vanishing right to protest

A great deal of media coverage has been given to ‘violent’ protests. But it’s a narrow view just to assume that the protestors are being violent; abuse is a two-way street – especially if bureaucracy is being used to quash dissent. By ANDREA ROYEPPEN AND JANE DUNCAN. The Daily Maverick

How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violent masculinities support endemic gender based violence in contemporary South Africa

How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violentmasculinities support endemic genderbased violence in contemporary... by TigersEye99

The Jacob Zuma Rape Trial: Power and African National Congress (ANC) Masculinities

The Jacob Zuma Rape Trial: Power and African National Congress (ANC)Masculinities by TigersEye99

The People Shall Obey

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In his speech at the memorial service for the soldiers who were killed in the Central African Republic Jacob Zuma presented us, and not for the first time, with the idea that we should receive another accumulation of bodies – of black bodies – as a tragedy, as a cruel consequence of the random movement of the wheel of fortune. Thabo Mbeki, watching our steady accretion of 'tragedies' from the sidelines, might, perhaps, have recalled a line from Shakespeare: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky.”

Dear Mr Zuma, it’s time for you to go

Barney Pityana

by Barney Pityana, The Sunday Independent

This week I addressed a letter to the President of the Republic of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. I asked Zuma to resign his office in the interests of progress and development of our country. I charged that since he assumed office in 2009, the fortunes of our country have hit their lowest ebb on every possible indicator.

Onwards with Integrity

Njabulo Ndebele

by Njabulo Ndebele, City Press

Quest for an honest society necessitates an honest struggle for it. You are the way you struggle

Amílcar Cabral, the great African revolutionary who led Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, combined a strong ­intellect with a deep passion for his country and its people.

Although his admirers are probably aware of the saying “tell no lies . . . claim no easy victories”, they might not be aware of the full context from which it is extracted.

“Hide nothing from the masses of our people,” begins the full quote. “Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy ­victories.”

Preventing the truth

Njabulo Ndebele

by Njabulo Ndebele, City Press

While the buildings at Nkandla cry out for an explanation, government seems content to gloss over the evidence

Nkandla is carving its place in our history as a major test of a people’s character. Few things in recent times will test the capacity of the people of South Africa to honour the truth. Public and private institutions all face the test.

The highest tree of the land, the president of the republic and head of state, is at the centre of it all. Will he, his government and the Parliament his party numerically dominates give the truth a place of honour? Or will they honour the lie?

Truth, honesty and trust have ­become the most radical values in South Africa; lying, dishonesty and distrust, their reactionary opposites.

Zuma and Zulu nationalism

Zuma has skillfully used Zulu or African ‘traditions’ to cover-up poor personal choices, indiscretions and wrong behavior, and portrayed those who oppose such poor behavior of being opposed to African ‘traditions’ or ‘culture,’ argues William Gumede.

For most of the 100 years of the ANC’s history, two distinct strands of Zulu nationalism competed for dominance in the ANC, but especially in the KwaZulu Natal wing of the party, the one conservative, and more closed-off, the other, progressive and more inclusive of other communities.