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?
Richard Pithouse -
In the cities of the global South elites are often desperate to repress the reality of the shack settlement. Maps are printed in which shack settlements appear as blank spaces, laws are passed that assume that everyone can afford to live formally and, in the name of order and development, the poor are beaten out of the cities. The great elite fantasy is the creation of 'world class cities' – shiny, securitised nowherevilles in which the poor understand that their place is to live in...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
Often civil society activism seems like a mixture of dissatisfaction and hope without much impact on the real world. Activists are usually conscious of the formidable odds against “change” because of the all encompassing and rarely adequately defined structures of power.
Underlying this idealism is the idea that planting the seeds for alternatives today will flower into something new at some undefined point in the future. In other words, in spite of all the work, the likely...
On the 2nd & 3rd of September 2009, the Constitutional Court of South Africa heard the final appeal in a case brought by five Soweto residents challenging prepaid water meters and insufficient free basic water. The Bill of Rights of the South African Constitution guarantees the right of access to sufficient water. However, poor communities in Johannesburg's townships do not have sufficient water and do not receive the same water service as the richer suburbs. This six year legal...
Dale T. McKinley -
A large part of the political, social and economic edifice of the apartheid system in South Africa was built on, and sustained by, the control of information and enforced secrecy. This was at the heart of the anti-democratic character of the apartheid system. It was the glue that held together the institutionalised violation of the basic human rights of South Africa’s majority. The struggle against apartheid was fundamentally, a struggle for the democratic reclamation of those...
Meizhu Lui talks at a seminar (in 2006, but still extremely relevant today) about issues covered in a book she co-authored with four others, The Colour of Wealth, which examines the racial wealth divide in contemporary America. Lui is currently director of the "Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative" at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. In the presentation featured in this post, Lui traces the historical antecedents of the racial...
Glenn Ashton -
We South Africans have all grown up in a big brother state. For whites it was a big brother that smothered them in privilege at the expense of everyone else; for blacks it was a more sinister big brother. As different as our segregated societies were, we had much in common. We were all ruled by an apparently omnipotent, fascist, militaristic and bureaucratic state. Blacks had passbooks, whites had books of life. Now we all have identity documents.
We have not really moved away from the...
