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.
Maeve McKeown -
In this, the year of renewed British patriotism, with a recent Royal wedding, the Olympics and the Queen’s Jubilee, a troubling truth has raised its head. Three elderly Kenyans are pressing claims against the British government for the torture they were subjected to under colonial rule. Apart from upsetting 2012’s patriotic apple cart, the Mau Mau court case raises complex questions about responsibility for colonial injustice, with potentially far-reaching implications....
Nick Turse -
They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a...
Glenn Ashton -
A dangerous international game is being played in the name of assisting Africa to feed itself. What is portrayed as charitable largesse has more in common with reinvigorating neo-colonialism than feeding Africans. This is in fact a misanthropic, multi-pronged raid by the G8 to control African commodities, land and seeds.
Africa presently occupies an interesting niche amongst the emerging, tripartite global realpolitik. First are longstanding, yet waning, relationships between Africa and...
Glenn Ashton -
South Africa looms large in the affairs of the Kingdoms of Swaziland and Lesotho, the local geo-political giant. Economically, each receives disproportionate amounts of their annual GDP directly from South Africa. Each is profoundly reliant on their powerful neighbour for the supply of food, fuel, goods and services and linking infrastructure to the world.
Given the vision of an African Union and increasing rapprochement between the members of the Southern African Development Community...
Dale T. McKinley -
The ghosts of the 2010 Soccer World Cup are coming back to haunt South Africa. Less than two years on and with preparations for the 2013 Soccer African Cup of Nations (AFCON) underway, the key lesson that should have been learnt from that grand orgy of egoism and money-grubbing appears to have already been stuffed right back into the closet. The lesson was that as long as the ‘game’ being played is one in which a domestic and international elite is the player, referee and owner,...
Mandisi Majavu -
Frantz Fanon once wrote that the challenge facing civil society and progressive governments in Africa is how to organize African countries around values that promote and encourage participatory democracy, equity and mutual aid. Although most African countries gained independence from European colonial rule in the 60s and the 70s, that remains the biggest challenge facing the continent today.
It is for this reason that many political commentators expected the Arab Spring in North Africa to...
