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 -
[D]eath is always close by, and what's important is not to know if you can avoid it, but to know that you have done the most possible to realize your ideas.
- Frantz Fanon, 1961.
As a boy without a father of his own and living as a ward of the Thembu Regent, Jongintaba Dalindyebo, at his Great Place at Mqekezweni in the green hills of the Transkei, Rolihlahla Mandela heard stories about people like Nongqawuse and Makana, people who had passed into the realm of myth. When he washed...
Frank Meintjies -
Each year we greet the ‘16 days of Activism to end violence against women and children’ with the usual mixed feelings. This is the dilemma - without it, there would be less awareness-raising on the issue. Yet the campaign is woefully inadequate. It has become co-opted by the establishment; it has become so routinized that key organisations leave their planning till late; key activists openly question the effectiveness of the campaign and, for many institutions, the “16...
Arturo Lopez-Levy -
Just before Thanksgiving, Cuban-American families who had hoped to spend the holidays with their Cuban relatives got some bad news.
On November 26th, Cuba suspended consular services — including the issuing of passports and visas — at its interest section in Washington. The move came after the Buffalo-based M & T Bank announced this summer that it would stop providing Cuba with banking services in the United States. The Cuban government could not find another bank to take...
War reporting is a difficult and dangerous game, and that's the case when those wars are declared and fought out in the open. Then there are the undeclared wars in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia fought through drone strikes and black ops teams -- covert military operations that officials barely even acknowledge. Those are the kinds of wars that Jeremy Scahill covers. Scahill made his name in 2007 with a book on Blackwater, the US military contractor that was paid big money by...
Richard Pithouse -
As Numsa head towards their special congress in Boksburg next week the tensions within Cosatu, and between Numsa and the SACP, are exploding. The critical question that is up for debate at the congress is whether or not the union should break with the ANC and support another party or set up its own party. If the union does decide to break with the ANC and set up a workers’ party its political credibility, solid organisational base and capacity to generate its own resources from its...
Using current technology, Mars could be colonised within decades, argues Adam Steltzner engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he led the design of the Mars Curiosity "sky hook" landing system. Steltzner projects how humans might be able to make a home beyond the confines of the Earth, but questions the motivations for such an endeavour. He argues, that a lot of people are attracted to the idea of colonising Mars because we are going to overpopulate or pollute this...
