The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Steven Friedman -
OUR real ‘ticking time bomb’ may be not poverty, but what it always has been – race. Our angriest people may not be those forced to survive on much less than they need, but the black middle class.
Poverty is our biggest problem: it affects most people and imposes huge economic and social costs. But the frequently heard claim that poor people are about to rise up and destroy the economy ignores reality: poverty usually forces people to be more pragmatic because more is at...
Following the ANC's robust win at the polls in South Africa's 2014 General Elections, on 22 May 2014, SACSIS and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation hosted a panel discussion to probe the question: "Will the ANC rule until Jesus returns?"
The primary impetus for this question was the fact that the ANC won the 2014 General Election despite its leader being tarnished by major corruption scandals and the party's service delivery record being less than exemplary. Meanwhile South...
Signs of overt racism are still prevalent in America, evident in a New Hampshire police commissioner’s use of an ethnic slur to describe President Obama. Despite the media highlighting the problem and people shaking their heads in disbelief, the problem of racism is rarely, if weakly addressed.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, thinks it’s time for a bold step to change the way people talk and think about race in America. Bill Moyers speaks to Coates...
Researchers have coined the phrase "colour blindness" to describe a learned behavior that we don't notice race. But colour blindness doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, says American finance executive Mellody Hobson. It means we are ignoring the problem and that's very dangerous. The subject of race can be very touchy, it's a "conversational third rail," argues Hobson, but that's exactly why we need to start talking about it. In this engaging talk, Hobson...
Mandisi Majavu -
Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote that “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.” Modern nation states and their immigration laws are largely founded on this logic. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was appealing to this logic when he labelled African asylum seekers, who took to the streets last month to protest against...
Richard Pithouse -
The road from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown winds past one luxury game farm after another. John Graham, a British soldier, drove the Xhosa people off this land, the Zuurveld, between 1811 and 1812. His soldiers burnt their homes, destroyed their crops and killed any man that resisted.
It was John Cradock, the governor of the Cape Colony, who had given Graham his orders. Cradock had some experience in these matters. He had crushed anti-colonial rebellions in Ireland and India before being...
