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?
Dr. Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University where he teaches contemporary political theory and urban studies and runs an annual semester long post-graduate seminar on the work of Frantz Fanon.
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Richard Pithouse -
More than half of our young people are unemployed. For many of these people there is no formal route through which they can develop their energies and creativity and have them rewarded with a passage into autonomy and adulthood. Time becomes circular rather than linear and as life moves in descending and tightening spirals rather than up and forward, pain and panic set into the bones.
Some people are able to keep their spirits up with the support of family, friends and congregations that...
Richard Pithouse -
There's no question that the debate, in and around the media, ignited by the ANC's response to Brett Murray's painting has been voluminous and intense in equal measure. But the way in which many of its protagonists have mobilised the idea of a tumultuous wave of threatening popular anger hasn't been borne out on the streets.
The march of just 300 at the court in Johannesburg and then, later, 600 people in downtown Durban were total flops. Any self-respecting grassroots organisation would,...
Richard Pithouse -
On the first day of March in 1981 Bobby Sands, imprisoned in the Long Kesh for links to the armed resistance to the British occupation of Northern Ireland, began a hunger strike. For seventeen days he was able to keep a diary. The first entry begins with two lines that have become immortal: “I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.”
In 1976 Margaret Thatcher's government had introduced a policy of 'criminalisation' that denied...
Richard Pithouse -
The allegations that have been levelled against Richard Mdluli are very serious. If they are true he is a dangerous man, a very dangerous man.
We do need to be mindful that some of the allegations against Mdluli have entered the public domain as different factions of the police leak information and allegations against each other. But Jacob Zuma's decision to make him the head of the Crime Intelligence unit in the police is still chilling. The man is accused of kidnapping, murder, fraud,...
Richard Pithouse -
As the African National Congress heads to its centenary conference in Mangaung and on to the end of its second decade in power there is still considerable popular fidelity to the ANC as an idea and as an identity. But the ANC does face declining electoral support, escalating popular protest and increasing hostility from the media, intellectuals and much of civil society. The authoritarian currents in the party like to blame all of this on sinister attempts to oppose a democratic government....
Richard Pithouse -
Taking over a mode of rule is not the same thing as transforming it. Barack Obama is not George Bush but that fact makes little difference to the bankers looking for a public subsidy or a wedding party in Pakistan at the moment when a drone rushes out of the sky.
Time and again governments that have come to power on the tide of popular resistance to oppressive systems have ended up reinscribing central aspects of the systems they had opposed. It's easy enough to imagine that on the...
