Democracy Now! - AMY GOODMAN: Breyten Breytenbach is one of South Africa’s most famous poets. He’s also an award-winning writer and painter, well known as an anti-apartheid activist, outspoken advocate for justice around the world. The exiled poet was born to an Afrikaner or white South African family in 1939. He moved to Paris in the early ’60s and became deeply involved with the anti-apartheid movement. In 1975, Breyten Breytenbach returned secretly to South Africa under a false...
Glenn Ashton - This year is the first that school students – or learners as they are now known - are to matriculate under the new Outcomes Based Educational system. OBE was adopted as one of the first major policy innovations under the newly democratic government in South Africa, under the ideological guidance of the first minister of education, Sibusiso Bengu. The demand to meaningfully change the educational system in South Africa was a priority intervention. The old system, irrevocably...
A six part documentary series recording important elements and actors in the apartheid struggle in South Africa and abroad from 1948 to 1990. Story One in the series, "The Road to Resistance," posted here, traces the struggle from the time that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted to the end of the two decades that followed. Story Two: The Long Walk of Exile Story Three: Don't Play With Apartheid Story Four: Apartheid and the Club of the West Story...
Fazila Farouk - Although important work is carried out in this field, we certainly don't hear enough about holding corporations accountable for the profits they pocketed during South Africa's apartheid years. The focus of South Africa's negotiated democracy has been finding unity in forgiveness. This is important for a country looking forward and trying to construct a civilised society, but it comes with a cost. This cost is a lack of acknowledgement for the ongoing suffering of South Africans whose human...
The Khulumani Support Group made headlines in May this year when it won the right to go to trial with its lawsuit against 23 international companies that aided and abetted the perpetration of human rights violations carried out by the South African government under apartheid rule. Watch this clip to find who these companies are and how they helped the apartheid state.
This advertisement produced a few years ago was banned from South African television. It shows white and black South Africans in reversed roles. Whites as maids, blacks as madams and so on. How odd that the advertisment invoked such controversy so as to get banned. This reaction is particularly problematic in light of the fact that few seem to be objecting to the reality of seeing black people living poorly.