Omar al-Bashir’s planned trip to New York to address a summit on sustainable development at the UN General Assembly involves considerable reputational risk for the US.
South Africa is emblematic of why violence against women responses in Africa are failing. While good measures are being rolled out, it lacks a united, comprehensive, multi-disciplinary response.
Tensions are probably inevitable in any constitutional democracy that empowers the courts to overrule the executive and legislature. But, judges are worried cabinet undermines the rule of law.
South African police are murdered at a high rate, making funerals and memorial services all too common. What happens and gets said at these services can help us understand aspects of police culture.
Concert organisers began to compete for government contracts. Often these contracts came with conditions as to who, among musicians, was desirable at government events.
National Women’s Day in South Africa marks the historic protest in 1956 of women against apartheid policies. But, six decades on, black women have yet to fully embrace feminism as a discourse.
The SACP is the oldest communist party in Africa, formed in 1921. It is one of only 20 parties which survived the anti-communist purge post independence. Its membership went through cycles over years.
The Farlam Commission has called for implementation of plans to demilitarise the police to prevent a recurrence of the Marikana massacre. But, no-one, including Farlam, has set out what this involves.
The leaders of South Africa’s governing ANC and its alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu, are holding an unprecedented week-long meeting at a time of grave difficulties afflicting the alliance.
The Freedom Charter, adopted at a meeting in Soweto on June 25-26 1955, triggered a paradigm shift in thinking about the democratic rights of black South Africans and their protection under the law.
With the election of Mmusi Maimane as leader, the Democratic Alliance, like the ANC, calculated that a black rather than coloured leader is needed for victory at the national level.
The release of Eugene de Kock, former commander of the notorious Vlakplaas counterinsurgency unit responsible for numerous clandestine assassinations in apartheid South Africa, raises a number of critical…
Oscar Pistorius has finally been sentenced, to what his judge described as “a sentence that is fair and just, both to society and to the accused”. For the culpable homicide of Reeva Steenkamp, he was sentenced…
It has been an interesting month for leaders across Africa. Goodluck Jonathan finally declared a “total war” against Boko Haram despite not having the means to wage one, and after a puzzlingly sluggish…
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State