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?
Professor Steven Friedman talks about his new book, "Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid". In the book, Friedman interrogates Wolpe’s ideas to engage with issues affecting modern-day South Africa.
Drawing on Wolpe's work, he argues that the role of private power in South Africa today is important to understand. “Anybody who believes that the future of this country is dependent on one political party isn't paying...
Siphokazi Magadla -
The 27th of January 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is the concentration camp in Poland where an estimated 1.1 million people were killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany during World War II. The victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau were killed in masses in gas chambers while some were beaten to death and others died of starvation, endured forced labour and suffered from infectious diseases. Speaking in front of the International...
Richard Pithouse -
We would be more effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be repressed and its consequences in the present naturalised. On the contrary it is because the development of an adequate understanding of how our society came to be as it is requires us to speak a lot more about both colonialism and...
In this 1990 interview with Bill Moyers, the recently deceased celebrated South African writer, Nadine Gordimer, says that she was slow to develop a political understanding, but that she came to understand politics through how it affected people rather than through theory. She talks about the astonishing experience of meeting real revolutionaries in the 1960's who went to jail for their ideals, which she says, was a revelation to her coming from a "petit bourgeoisie" background....
Steven Friedman -
OUR real ‘ticking time bomb’ may be not poverty, but what it always has been – race. Our angriest people may not be those forced to survive on much less than they need, but the black middle class.
Poverty is our biggest problem: it affects most people and imposes huge economic and social costs. But the frequently heard claim that poor people are about to rise up and destroy the economy ignores reality: poverty usually forces people to be more pragmatic because more is at...
Gillian Schutte & Sipho Singiswa -
Oppression, when written about, is often reduced to one layer of suffering. Yet when one unpacks the lives and narratives of the poor it becomes clear that their struggle to survive takes place under many layers of oppression.
Layer One: The History of Racial Oppression
The most obvious layer of oppression is that of a history of colonialism, labour and apartheid. Colonialists created ‘race’ as a way of oppressing the colonised. This race construct was created on the...
