Sisulu’s War of the Ages Begins

Richard Pithouse, The Con

In 2005, early in her in her first term as Minister of Housing, Lindiwe Sisulu announced that the state had resolved to ‘eradicate slums’ by 2014. This was a time when the technocratic ideal had more credibility than it does now and officials and politicians often spoke, with genuine conviction, as if it were an established fact that this aspiration would translate into reality. It was not unusual for people trying to engage the state around questions of urban land and housing to be rebuffed as troublemakers, either ignorant or malicious, on the grounds that it was an established fact that there would be no more shacks by 2014.

Re-configuring South Africa’s Youth Political Sphere

by Nomalanga Mkhize, Oppidan Press

A challenge was posed to me by the Chairperson of the Rhodes University South African Students Congress (SASCO), Mthobisi Buthelezi, at the seminar on “teaching born frees”.

He asked me to define what I meant when I said there was a missing “in-between sphere” in contemporary South African youth politics.

At the seminar I defined two dominant spheres of post-apartheid “youth political activity”.

Punishing Youth

by Henry Giroux, CounterPunch, 11 August 2012

There is by now an overwhelming catalogue of evidence revealing the depth and breadth of the state sponsored assault being waged against young people across the globe, and especially in the United States. What is no longer a hidden order of politics is that American  society is at war with its children, and that the use of such violence against young people is a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis.  Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its youth, the violence used against American youth speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, especially in light of the fact that As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is zero tolerance for poor minority youth and youthful protesters and “infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.” 

Reflections on Youth, from the Past to the Post-Colony

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