Western Cape Premier Helen Zille ‘s Twitter rant about colonialism caused an uproar as it brought back memories of a brutal and violent time in South Africa.
Portrait of Miriam Tlali as part of Adrian Steirn’s 21 Icons South Africa project. Date: 15.10.2014.
Adrian Steirn/Courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa
Author Miriam Tlali was an intersectional feminist long before this term was coined or its politics made fashionable in South Africa by student movements.
Cyril Ramaphosa celebrates his election as deputy president of South Africa’s embattled governing ANC.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
Cyril Ramaphosa is in pole position to become president of South Africa’s ruling ANC, 20 years after he lost the position by Thabo Mbeki. But, it won’t be easy. Neither will rebuilding the party.
Nelson Mandela, accompanied by his wife Winnie, walks out of the Victor Verster prison on February 11, 1990.
Ulli Michel/Reuters
The foundation founded by Nelson Mandela in 1999 has done a major revision - it has written off most of his reign as comprising “grand symbolic gestures”.
Paul Stopforth (b. 1946) ‘Elegy’ (1980). Graphite and wax on paper on board: 149 x 240 cm.
Courtesy Durban Art Gallery
Works like “Elegy” are ciphers for what it means to be human and vulnerable within a social and political regime in which not all bodies are considered equal
Author Christine Qunta says forgiveness trumps justice in South Africa.
Elelwani Netshifhire
Qunta advocates a reparations fund to accelerate corrective policies, that schools be freed from colonial indoctrination and that African culture should be mainstreamed, especially African languages.
Portrait of Miriam Tlali as part of Adrian Steirn’s 21 Icons South Africa project. Date: 15.10.2014.
Adrian Steirn/Courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa
Forty years after the students uprisings of 1976, South Africa is again in the midst of a political movement led by students.They have changed the tenor and shape of political discussion around education.
The Imin'esisdenge crew performing at Vukani in Grahamstown.
Azlan Makalima
Hip-hop artists do it differently in a town in one of South Africa’s poorest provinces. Eschewing the archetypal hip-hop lifestyle, Grahamstown’s rappers propose a surprising alternative.
If South Africans are to make the radical changes they must to become truly great, the new generation will have to find a way of understanding the country’s past in its profound complexity.
Supplication to authority – through pleading or vehement protest – is hardly the only way to bring about change in a democracy.
Sumaya Hisham/EPA
There are two concepts in education theory – the social construction of knowledge and the notion of self-efficacy for development –- that could help build a true democracy.
Will academics keep standing on the sidelines while students dismantle symbols of colonialism like the statue of Cecil John Rhodes?
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
African academics are steeped in European knowledge systems and ways of teaching. There is a galaxy of African scholarship they can draw from to change this - if they’re brave enough.
Journalists Thami Mazwai, left, and Jon Qwelane before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s special hearing on the media. They accused the white-owned press of colluding with apartheid.
Reuters
The egalitarian society envisioned by political activists and thinkers Rick Turner and Steve Biko has not been realised. But, they continue to inspire critiques of post-apartheid South Africa.
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.
Book theft in South Africa has recently been under the spotlight.
shutterstock
The late Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko and political philosophers Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe top the list of writers who get routinely abducted by discerning pirates of the book world.