A protest in early 2018 in Madrid demanding justice for victims of Spain’s stolen baby scandal.
Mariscal/EPA
Why social work needs a global truth and reconciliation commission.
Inequality in South Africa derives from settler colonialism. The country is incredibly unequal.
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Inequality persists in post-apartheid South Africa, reflecting the distribution of power. Reversing this will require changing the social processes and relations that underpin it.
Ahmed Timol, pictured in the centre of the 2nd row, was a teacher when he was killed by South African police.
ahmedtimol.co.za
The Timol ruling will not only have implications for crimes under apartheid, but also put the focus on torture within the South African Police Service.
Stellenbosch.
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The major issue is why this kind of research was being produced 25 years after the end of apartheid.
A view of Sandton City, the richest square mile in Africa, towering over Alexandra township, in Johannesburg.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook
In matters of policy-making and governing, understanding the systemic complexity of interrelated forces is crucial to avoiding failure.
Ahmed Timol’s funeral in 1972.
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In South Africa’s criminal justice system post-1994, the Timol case is the first to enact what can be properly understood as restorative justice.
The Dutch Royal Family lays a wreath at the National Monument in Amsterdam on May 4, 2009.
Reuters/Olaf Kraak
The Dutch holiday on May 4 that commemorates the country’s dead from World War II and after reveals how Dutch policy divides people along racial lines and ignores the Indonesian dead in that war.
Nelson Mandela and outgoing president Frederik Willem de Klerk.
Nelson Mandela’s dream of a great rainbow nation has been badly but not fatally undermined by corruption, violence and inequality.
A man challenges police during a protest in Eldorado Park, Johannesburg.
EPA-EFE/Kim Ludbrook
To claim that protests are being organised suggests sinister motives. But all protest is organised. So are cake sales and shopping expeditions.
One of the founders of South African Students’ Organisation, Steve Biko.
South African History Online
Fifty years after the founding of South African Students’ Organisation this anti-apartheid movement remains a model for student activists.
Women and children at a Red Cross camp for displaced victims of xenophobic violence in Johannesburg.
EFE-EPA /Kim Ludbrook
The action plan offers no information about budgets, oversight, clear standards for measuring progress or accountability mechanisms.
Mmusi Maimane, leader of South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, on the campaign trail.
EFE-EPA /Kim Ludbrook
There is a huge divide between what is important right now and what the election is likely to be about.
Between 1963 and 1969 Robert Sobukwe spent six years of near-complete solitary confinement on Robben Island.
Book cover
A collection of prison letters provides a peek into the suffering of South African liberation hero, Robert Sobukwe.
Editor Max du Preez with one of the early editions of Vrye Weekblad.
@klyntji/Twitter
A progressive Afrikaans newspaper will be relaunched soon. But Vrye Weekblad can’t trade on its history alone. It will need to consider the challenges of the present and the future.
Dorothy Masuku composed and recorded close to 30 singles, several of which achieved major hit status.
Madelene Cronje/ Mail & Guardian
Songstress Dorothy Masuku once told South Africa’s public broadcaster that music was like breathing for her.
Soweto in South Africa. Apartheid’s spacial planning still affects people’s lives.
Flickr/John Karwoski
The high costs of finding work make it difficult for young South Africans to get jobs.
In this October 1998 photo, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu dance after Tutu handed over the final report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Pretoria.
(AP Photo/Zoe Selsky)
Wherever there is an ugly, unresolved injustice pulling at the fabric of a society, there is an opportunity to haul it out in public and deal with it through a truth commission.
Hugh Lewin served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Institute for the Advancement of Journalism
Hugh Lewin is best known for two books that arose from his early involvement in the anti-apartheid underground.
Peter Storey (middle) outside the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, 1985.
Supplied
Christian leaders played a very significant role in fighting apartheid. One of them, Peter Storey, tells in his autobiography what shaped his convictions.
A Xolobeni villager protesting against mine development.
Flickr/Patricia Alejandro
Villagers from a community in South Africa’s Eastern Cape fought to be consulted and for the power to consent to mining their land.