Inquests into atrocities committed under apartheid are important because many South Africans are beginning to question whether justice was done under the country’s truth and reconciliation process.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu celebrated his 86th birthday and the unveiling of an arch in his honour outside St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
Forty years after the apartheid regime clamped down on the free press, South Africa’s media continues to face threats, albeit in more subtle forms than in the past.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu ‘s deep spirituality drove him to fight for freedom and justice.
EPA/Nic Bothma
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is first and foremost, a spiritual leader, a man of deep prayer. This motivated his participation in supporting South Africa’s liberation struggle.
Archbishop Tutu teaches that punishing wrongdoers, with an eye for an eye, is unjustified.
Filckr/UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre
Archbishop Bishop Desmond Tutu is well known for having invoked an ubuntu ethic to evaluate South African society, and he can take substantial credit for having made the term familiar.
Violent service delivery riot near Soweto, Johannesburg.Millions of poor South Africans live in shacks.
EPA/Nic Bothma
The National Question cannot be resolved solely through South Africa’s constitution. There’s potential for a far more radical transformative project than traditional liberalism.
Solar panels are integrated into a block of flats in the Viikki area of Helsinki, Finland.
Pöllö/Wikimedia
Not everyone can afford to pay for solar panels up front, but local planners can help disadvantaged households overcome energy poverty in several ways.
Today’s corporate CEO has more in common with Che Guevera than meets the eye.
Lena Wurm/Shutterstock.com
CEOs used to stay steadfastly neutral on divisive social and political issues. Those days are over, meaning today’s chief executive increasingly resembles Che Guevera.
Congolese women in the eastern town of Bunia. Even in conflict zones women are more likely to face violence in their homes than outside.
EPA/Murizio Gambarini
Shocking new findings show that even in conflict-affected countries where soldiers and rebel fighters are a daily danger to women, their husbands and boyfriends are the bigger threat.
Zimbabwean first lady Grace Mugabe
has been granted immunity.
EPA/Khaled el-Fiqi
Five years on, no-one has been held to account for the Marikana massacre where 34 miners were shot dead by members of the South African Police Service in a single day.
Nearly 60% of all South Africans, live on land or in dwellings outside of the land titling system.
Filckr/Icrisat
The conventional view is that insecurity of land tenure results from the lack of a registered title deed which records the property rights of occupants of land or housing.
‘Radical economic transformation’ in South Africa needs to move beyond rhetoric.
Flickr/Ryan McFarland
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.
Thousands of South Africans are calling for the legalisation of marijuana.
EPA/Nic Bothma
If South Africa’s argument in court is that marijuana causes harm, it deserves to lose. The real question it should ask is whether criminal prohibition is the effective way forward.
Land reform remains a divisive subject 23 years after democracy in South Africa.
Filckr
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.
The new French president’s committment to social justice has come in for questioning.
Kamil Zihnioglu/EPA
To honour the legacy of Nelson Mandela, South Africa could do with its citizens becoming more active in driving development - particularly efforts to tackle poverty an inequality.
Why is it easier to imagine a green ecocity than a just city where everyone belongs?
the yes man/flickr
What is an economy for? And how do we build a community where everyone belongs? We need to answer questions like these to create good, sustainable cities.
Protests escalate as corruption and public sector incompetence in South Africa hamper the provision of basic services.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook
The political cost of corruption is reaching unacceptable levels in South Africa. Reversing the effects of state decay on the poor will take short and long term interventions.
School children wave a South African flag after visiting the Nelson Mandela house museum in Soweto.
Reuters/Henry Romero
The judgment recognises that religion plays a large role in South African society. The right to follow a religion is embedded in the constitution. This means that South Africa isn’t a secular state.
Research Director: Developmental, Capable and Ethical State (DCES) research division, and Coordinator of the South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS), Human Sciences Research Council