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.

Andile Mngxitama: we need to draw a line in the sand

by Zackie Achmat & Richard Pithouse, GroundUp

On the 15th of March Jared Sacks, a journalist and activist, published an article in the Mail & Guardian asking whether or not Steve Biko, the Steve Biko of 1977, would have supported Mamphele Ramphele’s recent political initiative. Some people, including people who had been close to Biko, really liked the piece. Others, including the well-known public commentator Andile Mngxitama, didn’t like it at all.

“A failed man”: Mark Hunter’s Love in the Time of AIDS — a must read

Zackie Achmat, Writing Rights

Mark Hunter’s Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa provides the most rigorous analysis of the HIV epidemic that I have read. Revolutionary in its approach, Hunter’s account of the HIV epidemic interrogates the practices and impact of intimacy, sex and marriage over time through political economy and anthropology. He shows an inextricable link between the collapse of apartheid and the male-led household in Mandeni industrial township and Hlabisa’s rural villages in KwaZulu-Natal where adult HIV prevalence approached 40%.