Apartheid geography and murder in Cape Town

Zackie Achmat, GroundUp

At approximately 59/100,000 people per year, Cape Town has one of the highest murder rates in the world. What can we do about it?

There is a relationship between gangsterism, drugs, alcoholism, our violent cultures, poverty and murder in our city. But one of the most important factors, often ignored, is spatial injustice: the fact that many people essentially live in ghettos.

Cry me a river of crocodile tears

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

It is March. Anene Booysen is mutilated, murdered and raped. We are shamed into action, shaken by the brutality of the crime. We imagine our own seventeen year olds and we pray that her soul rests in peace.

It is October. Zandile and Yonelisa are murdered in communal toilets in Diepsloot. We think about our own babies, fat and brown swaying precariously on newly found feet. We wonder what their mothers would have felt. We want to weep.We are outraged.

Lewis Gordon on the Trayvon Martin Murder

The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of 'Nongoloza' Mathebula, 1867-1948

by Charles van Onselen (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984)

Introduction

Modern South Africa's industrial achievements are often pointed to with considerable pride — sometimes by outsiders, but more frequently by the powerful or privileged within the country. Viewed from the heights of the cabinet room, the company boardroom, the stock exchange or the bank, there is no doubt some justification for this pride. A country which in 1981 had a gross national product of approximately R70,000 million, a private consumption expenditure bill of almost R 38,000 million and a wage bill of close on R35,000 million is indeed, as a recent edition of the Official Yearbook of the Republic of South Africa put it, 'the economic workshop of the African Continent'¹ Yet common sense as much as class analysis would lead one to believe that the view from the lower terrain of the township house, the mine compound or the farm hut would be more critical.

City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo

“This is an extraordinary treatment of a difficult problem. . . . Much more than a conventional comparative study, ”City of Walls is a genuinely transcultural, transnational work—the first of its kind that I have read."—George E. Marcus, author of "Ethnography Through Thick & Thin

"Caldeira's work is wonderfully ambitious-theoretically bold, ethnographically rich, historically specific. Anyone who cares about the condition and future of cities, of democracy, of human rights should read this book."—Thomas Bender, Director of the Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges

The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century

This groundbreaking history aids any understanding of the rise of capitalism.

Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.

Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose—for a prvileged ruling class—of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private property. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws, such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's Triple Tree.