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?
Visit the archives.
Richard Pithouse -
In 1987, in the midst of a Cape Town winter, Jeremy Cronin wrote a poem about being on the run under the state of emergency, his picture on the walls of the police stations that still squat, square and fenced, across the country like forts on the borderlands of some incompletely subdued colony. The poem speaks of the “snuffling soul” of his newborn son as he stretches out his fist in the afterglow of the timeless pleasure of an infant at the breast. “In the depths of their...
Susan George -
"'All for ourselves and nothing for other people' seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind," wrote Adam Smith in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, universally considered the first comprehensive inquiry into the nature and practice of capitalism.
The masters of mankind are still with us: I call them the Davos class because, like the people who meet each January in the Swiss mountain resort, they are nomadic, powerful and...
Al Jazeera’s Witness tells the story of two Cape Flats teenagers who prepare for what is, thus far, the most important night of their lives – the matric dance. In the midst of widespread unemployment and gangsterism, a soaring school dropout rate and the complication of teenage pregnancies, this is the story of two “born frees” and their poignant journey through this rite of passage.
In the 2011 graduating class of Manenberg High School, 61 students made it to...
Mandisi Majavu -
Frantz Fanon once wrote that the challenge facing civil society and progressive governments in Africa is how to organize African countries around values that promote and encourage participatory democracy, equity and mutual aid. Although most African countries gained independence from European colonial rule in the 60s and the 70s, that remains the biggest challenge facing the continent today.
It is for this reason that many political commentators expected the Arab Spring in North Africa to...
Before Adbusters called on activists to Occupy Wall Street, thousands of Spaniards set up camp in Madrid’s iconic Puerta del Sol, and in public squares across the country. Now, as the occupy movement around the U.S. sets its sights on the longer term struggle for social and economic justice with movements like Take Back the Land and Occupy Our Homes, the Spanish experience has valuable lessons to offer what is now a globalized popular front.
© The Real News Network.
John Pilger -
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation located midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean.
The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and...
