Tongaat Mall Collapse: The Boomerang Effect

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In 1961 Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as “cut in two”, divided into “compartments .... inhabited by different species”. For Fanon the creation of different kinds of spaces was central to the creation of different types of people and their ordering in a hierarchy of value. He concluded that the ordering of the colonial world must be examined to “reveal the lines of force it implies”, lines of force that “will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized”.

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.

Time to stop feeding the parasites

by Lindela 'Mashumi' Figlan, The Daily Maverick

Apartheid was defeated by the will of the people, but when freedom arrived, along with it came a parasite. This parasite is eating the people’s struggle from the inside out. It’s time to rid South Africa of its unwelcome guest.

At home in Flagstaff my mother used to feed the two pigs with one big walking dish. One day I noticed that she was no longer feeding the pigs from one big walking dish and that she had separated one pig from another and was using two walking dishes. I was very stressed because one was getting thin and the other was getting fat. I asked my mother about her decision to feed the pigs separately. She told me the thin pig had a parasite that was eating it from the inside.

No end in sight for police brutality in South Africa

Justice Malala

by Justice Malala, The Guardian, 22 February 2013

People thought they would see no more peaceful protesters shot by police, but the force is turning violent again.

In July 2009 South Africa's then new police commissioner, Bheki Cele, told a newspaper he wanted the law to be changed to allow police to "shoot to kill" suspects without worrying about "what happens after that".

Two months later a young woman, Olga Kekana, was going out with three friends in a Pretoria township when she was shot through the head. The car she was travelling in was "mistaken" by police for one driven by car hijackers.

Two Articles on Public Housing in Durban: Enrichment, Violence, Exclusion & Resistance

The Uganda Transit Camp, Isipingo, Durban

Uganda Transit Camp, Durban: A report from the frontlines of the struggle for democracy

Just two decades after the dawn of democracy, an old horror is revisiting the new South Africa. Transit camps are back, and they are back with a vengeance, writes JARED SACKS, Daily Maverick

Close to midnight and you can still hear babies wailing, couples quarrelling and house music blaring through the razor-thin zinc sheets that the eThekwini Municipality calls “walls” in Uganda Transit Camp near Isipingo, Durban. Getting a decent night’s sleep is a struggle in and of itself. And yet, that’s only the beginning.

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.

On Corruption

by Richard Pithouse, The Cape Times & The Daily News

Corruption in South Africa is not nearly as ubiquitous as it is in countries like India or Italy. But it is becoming an increasingly ordinary part of the texture of every day life. It is certainly a serious issue and its certainly obscene that even state projects with as urgent a social function as providing school books and housing to the poor are taken more seriously in some quarters as opportunities for personal enrichment than as collective social obligations. Its equally obscene that corporate power has colluded to fix the price of a commodity as basic as bread in a country where its not unusual for people to get through their day on little more than a cup of sweet tea and a couple of slices of white bread.

A meditation on corruption

by Njabulo S Ndebele, City Press

Jackie Selebi is now in jail. Found guilty of engaging in illegal financial transactions for personal gain, otherwise known as corruption, he is serving a 15-year jail sentence. Many will feel “justice has been done”. A highly credentialed “big fish” of the new dispensation has finally been put behind bars.

Who will be next among high-profile candidates who feature prominently under a cloud of suspicion in the national news? Who among them will be the next to fall from grace?

Opposing ‘tenderpreneurs’ in a democratic SA

By Imraan Buccus, October 2011 - The contradictions and levels of hypocrisy are in SA are stark. Nonetheless politics in SA is interesting and mind -boggling. But, then again, that old Chinese curse does make it clear enough that interesting times aren’t always good times. The Mercury

In the late nineties leading communists were driving the move towards privatization and the ‘restructuring of state assets’. In fact at one point in the nineties, it had become almost impossible to champion communism within the ranks of the SACP. Indeed a party member actually advocating communism was likely to be expelled from the party on the grounds of ill discipline. And in recent times, the communists are resisting the nationalizing of mines while some nationalist ‘tenderpreneurs’ demand nationalization with increasing hysteria. This must be more than a little confusing for many who would have thought that communists would naturally gravitate to, and align themselves with calls for nationalization while nationalists would oppose nationalization by all means necessary.

On the Casual Bulldozing of a Shembe Temple in Durban

by Richard Pithouse, The Mercury, January 2011

Whenever they find a reality that doesn’t suit them / they alter it with a bulldozer - Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege, Ramallah, 2002.

Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who wrote, especially towards the end of his life, with a real confidence in what he called the butterfly's burden, the social weight carried by delicate beauty, began his life in al-Birwa, a village in Galilee. He was seven years old when his family fled the Israeli military in 1948 and his life was spun between Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Paris and Ramallah before he died in Houston in 2008. 

Ayanda Kota on Julius Malema & the Pitfalls of National Consciousness in Contemporary South Africa

Julius Malema is a Demagogue and his Nationalization Would be Nothing but a Massive Public Subsidy for the Rich

The mass movements that have raised progressive governments to power in Latin America, the global financial crisis, the recent uprisings in the Arab world and the ongoing rebellion of the poor in our own country have all created more space for the left. The days when so many people believed that there was no alternative to capitalism and imperialism are passing. Socialism is back on the agenda. It is clear to many people that we cannot continue to organise our economy around the interests of big capital while leaving the people to suffer as they are.