The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
South Africa plays an important role in the Southern African region and on the African continent, as a whole. SACSIS will provide news about the region and the continent, with a particular focus on South Africa's relationship to the rest of the African continent.
Emira Woods, Janet Redman & Elizabeth Bast -
As children throughout the United States head back to school, it’s a good time to remember that schoolchildren throughout Africa often attend schools with no electricity. In areas that do have the utility, frequent power outages are a constant reminder of the need for dependable access to electricity.
In June, U.S. policymakers announced two initiatives aimed at increasing electricity production in Africa. President Obama launched Power Africa, an initiative that makes a $7-billion...
Nick Turse -
They’re involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that’s just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the U.S. military is...
Alex Kane -
If you’ve been trying to closely watch recent events in Egypt, your head may be spinning. Turmoil continues to rock the country in the aftermath of the July 3 military coup that overthrew former President Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood movement who is now being held incommunicado by Egypt’s ruling generals. From the killing of Islamist prisoners to the ambush on Egyptian police officers in the Sinai region, events continue to move at an insanely fast pace in the...
Glenn Ashton -
Just as Chicken Little is convinced that the sky is going to fall on his head, the constant repetition of the scaremongering trope that we are under collective, imminent threat of starvation because of our burgeoning global population has persuaded the uninformed that this is so. This narrative is about as nuanced as the recent movie World War Z, where zombies overrun a helpless population.
Just as the zombie movie presents an implausible, Hollywood take on the world, the ostensible food...
Eric Draitser -
Zimbabwe’s upcoming elections, scheduled to take place on July 31st, will go a long way to determining the future of the country. On the one hand, the entrenched power of President Mugabe and ZANU-PF enters the elections with a track record that both elicits praise and inspires criticism. On the other hand, there is Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which enters the election once again with the high-minded rhetoric of...
Sreeram Chaulia -
The British government’s offer of monetary compensation of £20 million to over 5,000 living Kenyan survivors of systematic torture during the Mau Mau anti-colonial revolt is a historic reckoning with an ugly past. Instead of bringing the sordid chapter of crimes committed against nationalist movements to closure, this settlement is bound to trigger other claims in the former colonies of Pax Britannica.
It also augurs a thorough re-evaluation of European colonial empires and...
