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?
Dr. Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University where he teaches contemporary political theory and urban studies and runs an annual semester long post-graduate seminar on the work of Frantz Fanon.
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Richard Pithouse -
Julius Malema, unlovely as he is, is a symptom, a morbid symptom to be sure, of the crisis that we face. Any assumption that his effective expulsion from the ANC allows us to continue with business as usual will guarantee the emergence of more symptoms, different but equally morbid.
The real roots of our crisis lie in the fact that the post-apartheid deal has not only allowed elites to flourish while the people at the bottom of society have been pushed further into desperation but...
Richard Pithouse -
On Thursday and Friday this week the ANC Youth League will lead marches on the JSE, the Chamber of Mines and the Union Buildings. Julius Malema's disciplinary hearing is likely to be concluded earlier in the week and these protests are planned as a show of force intended to either weaken the resolve of the disciplinary committee or to make it look like a reactionary clique opposed to the interests of the people as a whole.
Malema is power hungry, corrupt, authoritarian and brutish. But he's...
Richard Pithouse -
In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel's central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together....”
That wondering is a...
Richard Pithouse -
When the Springboks are running rampant even a drab supermarket in a small town can take on a carnival air with excited conversation moving between people without regard to all the usual barriers. But the nation, as we all know, is riven with all kinds of fractures. For the ANC some of these fractures can be useful as it seeks to sustain its moral authority while electoral support declines, popular protest continues and internal battles escalate. But other fractures pose a real challenge to...
Richard Pithouse -
The words that escaped from Darren Scott's private life and crashed into the public realm via an argument in a bar are no unique perversion. For anyone with any doubts about the extent to which white racism not only spills over into the new order but also continues to reinvent itself the comments sections on news and analysis websites, spaces that enable public anonymity, make for dispiriting reading.
But with the exception of extreme figures like Steve Hofmeyer white racism is a...
Richard Pithouse -
Tokyo Sexwale recently announced, in Brandfort, in a performance carefully choreographed to be rich with the symbolism of a once insurgent nationalism, that Winnie Mandikizela-Mandela will lead a new government task team on informal settlements. “She will”, he said, “help us develop informal settlements because we cannot solve it without the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela motherly heart.”
In the national imagination Brandfort is the feminine version of Robben Island, a...
