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?
Mandisi Majavu -
With Youth Day upon us again this week commemorating the contribution made by the school-going children of Soweto during the apartheid struggle in 1976, it’s hard to gloss over the enormous sacrifices they made. How tragic it is then that 21 years into our democracy, their massive impact has merely led to a fragile pact between black and white South Africans, where blacks have yet to be unconditionally welcomed in historically white neighbourhoods and institutions, and where white...
Tim Wise -
In a country where being black increases your likelihood of being unemployed, poor, rejected for a bank loan, suspected of wrongdoing and profiled as a criminal, being arrested or even shot by police, the mind boggles at Rachel Dolezal's decision some years ago to begin posing as an African American. Yes perhaps blackness helps when you’re looking for a job in an Africana Studies department, selling your own African American portraiture art, or hoping to head up the local NAACP...
Tech expert Michael Schrage calls voicemail "an anachronism" whose time has come and gone. Could e-mail be next? Schrage argues that people prefer scanning texts than listening to voice messages. Highlighting it as a demographic phenomenon he says, “I don’t think there’s anybody I know under the age of 30 who listens to their voicemail.” The era of e-mail is going to vanish too because people are using LinkedIn and Facebook, Yammer and other social media...
Anna Majavu -
It will be 30 years next month since French intelligence agents bombed the first Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, sinking the ship and killing one crew member. The event is currently being commemorated around the world. What is less well known about the anti-whaling ship is that it was also instrumental in transporting indigenous Pacific Islanders from their homes which had been contaminated by American nuclear testing.
The citizens of Rongelap in the Pacific’s Marshall Islands...
Judith Lynne Hanna -
Merely art? Recreation? Dance may be the Cinderella of education. About 400 studies related to interdisciplinary 21st-century neuroscience lead to the discovery that there is a hidden value to dance education for young and old alike.
Dance is a language of physical exercise that sparks new brain cells (neurogenesis) and their connections that are responsible for acquiring knowledge and thinking. Dancing makes some neurons nimble so that they readily wire into the neural network. Neural...
Seventeen years ago, a warm wind was blowing across the pacific. As it blew, it pushed some warmed waters westwards, piling them high to the north east of Australia. When the winds eased, the warm waters washed back across the vast ocean releasing masses of heat into the atmosphere in what became the mother of all El Niño events. It was 1998 and the climate seemed set on a frightening trajectory. But the years that followed didn't live up to predictions, leading to a crisis of...
