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?
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...
Saliem Fakir -
The ANC is no longer sure of who is friend or foe. Some of its traditional members and ardent supporters are quietly vying for the Congress of the People (COPE) while pretending to be all for the ANC in public. Come the day of the secret ballot, they will have already turned.
Some have already made the leap. Others are waiting for when the time is right to join COPE more openly. And, yet others simply have a genuine concern about South African democracy and its future and will vote for COPE...
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...
Prof. Hoosen Coovadia commends the scale of HIV funding by 80-odd international funding organisations that have provided support for the pandemic, but argues that we need a much stronger effort. He laments the fact that funding initiatives force South Africans (and others) to make difficult choices because of the way funding streams are defined.
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...
Colette Francis Ashton -
Book: Choice, Not Fate: The Life and Times of Trevor Manuel
Author: Pippa Green
Publisher: Penguin Books
Reviewer: Colette Francis Ashton
When I sat down to read the biography of Trevor Manuel I knew that, for me, it would stand or fall on how well it answered three nagging questions I had about the Finance Minister. Firstly, what exactly was Manuel’s role in the arms deal? Is he really a ‘neoliberal’? And lastly, what was the personal motivation behind his resignation...
