The membership base of South Africa’s trade union movement has undergone significant changes which begs the question: has it moved away from its working class roots to become a middle class movement.
South Africa’s governing ANC has always seen economic growth as the driving force for change. This was wishful thinking as the damage done by apartheid will take far more to undo.
After South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, the previously oppressed and dispossessed black majority hoped for constitutional restitution of their land. This has largely failed.
Rock music against military conscription during 1980s South Africa resonated with wider fault lines in Afrikaner society - this as the apartheid regime’s grip on power started to slip.
Two of South Africa’s finest musicians, Johnny Mekoa and Ray Phiri, died recently. The permeable terrain between genres their careers negotiated, is being replaced by rigid marketing categories.
Namibian hero and former Robben Island prisoner Toivo ya Toivo was part of a generation who contributed to the struggles against apartheid and colonialism in the region.
Reggae in South Africa has lost its visibility and prominence inside the country after apartheid. But local artists have built up extensive international links.
Andimba (Herman) Toivo Ya Toivo remained loyal to what made him the personification of the desire to live in an independent country governed by, and for, its people.
The prevailing mandate of the South African Reserve Bank is informed by sound economics and the need to protect the institution from the whims of politicians.
South Africa’s Public Protector, Busisiwe Mkhwebane has touched on two highly contentious issues: the unresolved bailout for a local bank three decades ago. And the role of the country’s Reserve Bank.
Apartheid was to officially end in 1994. So was the fashion of wearing hats as the formalities of business, church and leisure gave way to the informality of urban equality.
As an intellectual history of the disciplines of paleontology and paleoanthropology, Kuljan’s book is especially adept at narrating the interwoven connections between science and power.
In the new introduction to his prison memoir South African anti-apartheid stalwart Raymond Suttner uses the word ‘betrayal’ to explain his break from the ANC.
For a military battle whose outcome is still hotly contested 30 years later, the impact was so remarkably clear – independence for Namibia, peace for Angola and the death knell for apartheid.
In the US and South Africa, “passing” as another race has a long and painful history. Controversial American Rachel Dolezal’s “passing” to justify her identity makes a mockery of such histories.
Afrikaans is very much a black language. The apartheid government’s ploy to construct it as a “white language”, with a “white history”, denied the commonality of the language across race and class.