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.
Leonard Gentle -
The victory of the Egyptians and Tunisians in getting rid of Mubarak and Ben Ali has revitalised activists everywhere. More recently, though, the news has been dominated by the brutality of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
Whereas Libya continues the wave of uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, there is a vital difference: Libya presents a picture of people as victims of violence, raising the need for “the international community” to come to the rescue; a tale we’ve...
Richard Pithouse -
As the first unconfirmed reports of airborne attacks on protestors in Tripoli and Benghazi reached Al Jazeera the station crossed to a spokesperson for the European Union. There was talk of the need to affirm ‘European values’. Moments later the programme cut away to the story of the two Libyan fighter pilots who had landed in Malta and sought political asylum rather than obey orders to attack protestors in Benghazi.
Those pilots are not the first people to have arrived in Malta...
Jason Hickel -
The last decade has seen a remarkable surge in U.S. economic interest in the continent of Africa. Policymakers who once considered Africa the languid backwater of global economics are now rushing in to stake a claim in the continent’s enormous resource endowment. Most of this effort operates with a rhetoric focused on “partnership” and “development,” with the vision of using US trade and investment to lift Africans out of poverty. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary...
Glenn Ashton -
The borders of Sudan, Africa’s biggest country, are about to change, provided all the players in this grand game stay the distance. This could be the most significant redrawing of the colonial boundaries of Africa since the colonial transition that saw the departure of the European colonial powers, abandoning their "places in the sun."
The partition of Africa into its present illogical and arbitrary boundaries took place just over a century ago, during what is now known as...
Fazila Farouk -
Forty years ago, musician and poet, Gil Scott-Heron wrote, “The revolution will not be televised,” as he encouraged an awakening of activism amongst disenfranchised African Americans whose sense of indignation had been dulled by that opiate of the masses, television.
In the four decades since those words were penned, they’ve assumed a global significance for the downtrodden and disenfranchised of our world, who, for too long have borne the burden of a jaded public...
Glenn Ashton -
Conventional wisdom insists that our burgeoning global population requires ever increasing quantities of food to feed its numbers. We need to ask two questions of this received wisdom. Firstly, is it true that we need to produce more food? Secondly, are the proposed methods of increasing food production suitable, adequate or acceptable?
In order to provide improved food security for the significant proportion (anywhere between 1 and 3 billion people, depending on whose figures you believe)...
