The ANC Women's League: Sex, Politics and Gender

ANC Women’s League: A history as complex and varied as women themselves

Amidst all the confusion over whether SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng was indeed offered a woman as a present by Venda leaders, one aspect was utterly unremarkable: that the ANC Women’s League did not make a peep of protest. It’s the silence we’ve come to expect from a League which seems to have a decidedly idiosyncratic approach to which issues affecting SA women it chooses to make a noise about. But as a fascinating new book on the League’s history explains, it’s a body which has been mired in ideological contestation virtually from its inception. By REBECCA DAVIS. The Daily Maverick

Christopher Merrett, The Witness

“AN ANC campus”: that is what University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Student Representative Council (SRC) members in Pietermaritzburg reportedly claimed last week when objecting to a visit and speech by Mamphela Ramphele.

She went ahead without disruption, but with the precautionary presence of a contingent of police.

There was a time, before South Africa became a democracy, when certain speakers were effectively banned from the local campus. During the State of Emergency, Inkatha was excluded on the grounds (later vindicated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) that it was an ally of the securocrats who had resorted to officially promoted lawlessness.

Not all is well with Zuma's soul

by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Last Sunday I attended a service at the Park Avenue Methodist Church in New York. The sermon, by the Reverend Cathy Gilliard, was based on the story of the orphaned Jewish girl Esther, who was chosen to be the queen of Persia. When the king's right-hand man devised a plot to kill all the Jewish people because Esther's uncle, Mordecai, refused to bow down to him, Esther continued to hide her identity. But Mordecai called on Esther to stop playing it safe and speak out on behalf of her people: "Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this."