Brenda Fassie: The Gender Context
I’m Not Your Weekend Special: Portraits on the Life+Style & Politics of Brenda Fassie Edited by Bongani Madondo (Picador Africa) Botswana: 1983. Arriving from the UK, jet-lagged, all I want to do when I hit my dusty faculty flat is sleep. It’s not to be. Across the road, masked by bougainvillea, the University of Botswana campus […]
‘A Party of Crooks and Thieves’
In the build-up to the 2011 elections in Russia, the opposition rallied around a powerful slogan coined by public corruption fighter and opposition politician Alexei Navalny. The phrase rebranded United Russia, the political party of President Vladimir Putin, from “the party of real deeds” to “the party of crooks and thieves”. As Ben Judah points out […]
The “Numsa Moment”: A New Trajectory for Workers
In January 1973, dockworkers in Durban embarked on a wave of wildcat strikes against low wages. In total, some 61 000 workers took part. What became known as the “Durban Moment” not only broke the industrial relations framework that had been established after black trade unions had been smashed by the apartheid state in […]
For Whom the Roads Toll
Book Excerpt: The Promise of Justice John Clarke is a social worker who takes the first obligation of his profession seriously: to challenge social injustice on the basis of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Having worked since 2006 with the amaDiba rural residents of the Wild Coast to successfully assert their constitutional rights in opposing […]