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.
Umkhonto weSizwe founder Nelson Mandela, receives military training at an Algerian FLN camp in Morocco, 1962.
South African History Online
The Algerian revolution had a profound effect on both Mandela and Fanon’s thinking about colonisation, oppression and freedom.
The TRC’s first hearings in 1996. Left to right: Nomonde Calata, a TRC counsellor, and Nyameka Goniwe.
Jon Hrusa/Sunday Times
Twenty years after the final report of South Africa’s Truth Commission, dealing with the past will always remain “unfinished business”.
Single parent and extended families are the dominant family forms in South Africa.
shutterstock
More attention needs to be paid to aligning South Africa’s family policy with the realities of everyday life.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa faces the daunting task of fighting corruption and winning votes for his party.
GCIS
Polls indicate that South Africans are unlikely to totally abandon the African National Congress.
One of the new resolutions on land related to Namibia’s urban areas, like the capital city Windhoek.
Grobler du Preez/Shutterstock
The question of land has been hotly contested in Namibia ever since independence.
Kewpie at the site of a demolished building after the forced removals from District Six, Cape Town.
Kewpie Collection/GALA
Despite South Africa’s progressive constitution, LGBTIQ people continue to face discrimination in all social spheres.