Demand for housing in South Africa continues to outstrip supply despite the government having made more than three million houses to poor households.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
The dismally slow provision of housing in South Africa is such that more than 2.2 million households live in 2700 informal settlements. Waiting is the norm and can take years, even decades.
Seabelo Senatla of South Africa scores a try against New Zealand during the gold medal match of the Rugby Sevens at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
Reuters/Russell Cheyne
By investing in the 2022 Commonwealth Games, South Africa sacrifices investment in pressing societal needs. Instead, the country should be mobilised around the national goal of fixing schooling.
Leaders at the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November 2013. Malta will host the next one in November 2015.
Reuters/Dinuka Liyanawatte
The Commonwealth is politically fraught, with widely divergent members. But, instead of unravelling as some critics wish, it has instead inspired copycats and appears set to grow and endure.
Black students at University of Stellenbosch protest against the institutions’s language policy they say discriminates against them by favouring Afrikaans.
Times Media/Adrian de Kock
Black youth are grappling with the question of the meaning of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. They seek an antidote to their reality wherein blackness continues to be mocked and marginalised.
Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir addresses members of the UN Security Council in Khartoum in 2008.
Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah
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.
Violence against women is rife in South Africa.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
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.
South African President Jacob Zuma, right, listens to Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng ahead of Zuma’s second inauguration in Pretoria.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
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.
The conduct of police at colleagues’ funerals sheds light on police culture.
Reuters/Dylan Martinez
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.
Dockworkers in Australia, pictured here alongside other trade union members in a march through central Melbourne, acted in solidarity with South African workers in the 1980s.
Reuters
The Anti-Apartheid Movement reminds us that ordinary people can make a difference in the fight for workers’ rights, even halfway across the planet.
In a track called Bring it Back Home, Hugh Masekela bemoans the tendency by politicians, who after ascending to power, discard the people who helped them get there.
Andrea De Silva/Reuters
Concert organisers began to compete for government contracts. Often these contracts came with conditions as to who, among musicians, was desirable at government events.
The mobilisation of women has taken on many forms across the continent.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Writing about the women’s and feminist movements is a definitional minefield. The two are often conflated, more so in Africa.
For black women demands for equal dignity and fairness do not necessarily entail a desire to do away with male leadership in the home, community and country.
EPA/Jim Hollander
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.
South African Communist Party general secretary and South Africa’s higher education minister Blade Nzimande addresses the party’s 3rd special congress in Soweto in June.
Sowetan/Vathiswa Ruselo
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 found that the police inappropriately chose to forcibly break the strike at Marikana, resulting in the deaths of 34 miners.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
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.
South African President Jacob Zuma is also head of the country’s governing ANC. Leaders of the party and its alliance partners are meeting to take stock amid tough times.
Reuters/Rogan Ward
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 more than two million houses built by the state and transferred to the residents as freehold property, many with solar energy, are the most visible of the Freedom Charter’s achievements.
Reuters
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.
Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini with the late former South African president Nelson Mandela and Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Mandela combined a deep faith in culture and constitutionalism.
Reuters
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.
Wife of the late former South African President Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela Mandela (centre), led a march during a ‘Women’s Day’ rally in Pretoria in 2000.
Reuters
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