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?
Eddie Cottle -
When South African security services prevented a Cape Town girl from boarding a plane allegedly to join ISIS, many South Africans were pleased but at the same time surprised at how swift the reaction of our security services were. How come the same reaction is not applied to South African Zionist Jews serving in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF)?
The swift action of the South African security services was carried out in terms of the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act (RFMA),...
Richard Pithouse -
In recent days and weeks the liberal consensus on which the post-apartheid order was founded has been burnt away like morning mist giving way to the heat of the rising sun. From our liberal universities to the streets of Durban and Johannesburg liberal values have been spurned. This is not a new phenomenon. When popular organisation arrogates for itself the right to occupy land outside of the mechanisms endorsed by the state and the market, or when the ANC mobilises against a painting, or...
Two decades ago, a psychology student doing his training at one of Argentina's oldest psychiatric wards kept being asked by his family and friends what it was like to work in there. So he came up with an idea: to let the patients explain in their own words. The first radio station to broadcast from inside a mental hospital was born. Radio La Colifata - has been on air from Hospital Jose Borda in Buenos Aires for 23 years. The voices it includes are enough to make anyone in the mainstream...
Chris Hedges -
MINISINK, N.Y.—The affable, soft-spoken dairy farmer stood outside his 70-stall milking barn on his 230-acre family farm. When his father started farming there in 1950 were about 800 dairy farms in New York state’s Orange County. Only 39 survive. Small, traditional farms have been driven out of business by rising real estate prices, genetic manipulation of cows, industrial-scale hormone use that greatly increases milk production, wildly fluctuating milk prices and competition from...
An international summit on reparations for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade took place in New York last week. Participants demanded that European and American governments compensate the descendants of African people for slavery, forced free labor, and systemic racism and discrimination within the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. The New York summit was historic in that 15 Caribbean countries that comprise CARICOM (the Caribbean Community) are finalizing how to extract...
Fazila Farouk -
Analysts argue that the expulsions of Zwelinzima Vavi and Numsa from Cosatu, by a faction sympathetic to President Jacob Zuma, have clear consequences for a major re-alignment of labour in South Africa. Perhaps more importantly it forces to the fore significant consequences for the re-alignment of politics in South Africa.
Numsa, the radical metalworkers’ union, is in fact hosting a “Conference for Socialism” this very week to determine whether the ground in South Africa...
