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?
Vanessa Burger -
It’s always easy to bully the weak. Or blame the victim. Or focus on superficial details instead of addressing the big picture. Most medication treats the symptoms but rarely the cause of an illness.
Unsurprisingly, this also applies to the recent anti-prostitution protests organised by the Bulwer Community Safety Forum in Glenwood, Durban. Disappointingly however, many of the organisers and participants of this protest should know better.
When symptoms of an illness persist after...
Relations between the U.S. and Iran reached a historic level after a deal was signed on Sunday. The deal calls for Iran to halt most of its uranium enrichment efforts, eliminate its stockpiles of uranium, open its facilities to daily monitoring by international inspectors, and significantly slow the construction of the Arak reactor. Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer who has worked in the U.S. nuclear complex for more than 30 years and assisted the IAEA as the director in the Iraq Action Team...
Mandisi Majavu -
The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) official position on the Employment Equity Amendment Bill reveals, among other things, the irrelevance and the inadequacy of classic liberalism in addressing racial justice in post-apartheid South Africa. The Party Leader, Helen Zille, characterises the bill as “Verwoerdian social engineering”. Zille’s reasoning is that “there is nothing progressive about coercion that enforces racial quotas…”
Zille’s...
South African contemporary rock fusion band, All Clear, has just released a superb rock song, Amandla Marikana - from their Faster than Light album - that remembers the slain miners of Marikana and draws attention to the ongoing struggles of minerworkers today.
All Clear is a three-year-old band that describe themselves as, "dedicated to producing original but popular and accessible music with powerful rhythms that draw on many traditions - rock, reggae, folk, ska, jazz and pop - and...
Richard Pithouse -
In 1961 Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as “cut in two”, divided into “compartments .... inhabited by different species”. For Fanon the creation of different kinds of spaces was central to the creation of different types of people and their ordering in a hierarchy of value. He concluded that the ordering of the colonial world must be examined to “reveal the lines of force it implies”, lines of force that “will allow us to mark out the lines...
Bandile Mdlalose is the Secretary General of shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. In an interview with Fazila Farouk of SACSIS, she talks about her involvement in the struggle for a democracy that respects the rights and dignity of the poor in South Africa.
Mdlalose voluntarily swapped life in a township house for life in a shack in order to better understand the challenges faced by shack dwellers. A leading voice in her community, she talks about the intimidation and...
