Keyword: rural women

Best of SACSIS: King's Land Claim Signals Land Grab for Mineral Rights by Rural Elites

Picture: SACSIS Video In recent months, it has been reported that the Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini, under the auspices of the Ingonyama Trust, is preparing to lodge a massive land claim that will cover much of the land in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Why is King Zwelithini lodging a land claim that goes back to 1875 when South Africa’s land restitution programme only recognizes land dispossessions after 1913? Speaking at an event hosted by SACSIS and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) to examine...

Locusts on the Horizon

Picture: balazsgardi/Flickr Richard Pithouse - Taking over a mode of rule is not the same thing as transforming it. Barack Obama is not George Bush but that fact makes little difference to the bankers looking for a public subsidy or a wedding party in Pakistan at the moment when a drone rushes out of the sky. Time and again governments that have come to power on the tide of popular resistance to  oppressive systems have ended up reinscribing central aspects of the systems they had opposed. It's easy enough to imagine that on the...

Of Kings and Women

Picture: I am Kat Glenn Ashton - The reconfiguration of the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs has come into sharp focus as local government elections draw closer. The notion of locating traditional affairs at the local government level has detractors and I count myself among them. The conflation of the two means that patriarchal interpretations of social and developmental priorities will continue to undermine and dispossess women living in those communities. The battle between...