A new Zion
The spread of Garveyism from the US to Africa was as much about political liberation as it was religious salvation.
South Africa
Rise of the reactionaries
AfriForum is no longer on the political fringe in South Africa, rather it's key in perpetuating increasingly mainstream, right-wing populism.
Reading List: Melinda Ferguson
The award-winning South African author Melinda Ferguson takes us through a selection of books exploring freedom, death, truth, as well as psychedelics, which can be a route to pondering such big questions.
Dispossessing to deliver
In South Africa, land occupiers are evicted from their homes in the name of housing delivery. On the Africa Is a Country Podcast this week, we attempt to understand why.
The slow cancellation of the future
Anxious and isolated, living in poverty or financial precarity, we sink into ourselves and adopt self-destructive coping mechanisms.
The quiet violence of child maintenance
Humiliation and stigma are companions for women seeking assistance from courts to obtain maintenance in South Africa.
Sleepwalking into fascism
That reactionary politics today lack a mass character is what makes them so dangerous.
Tiptoeing across the minefield of neutrality
Recent US-South Africa relations appear to be firmly stalled in the cul-de-sacs of imperial or sub-imperial diplomacy.
The land and the sea
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
The gossip bros
The age of the podcasters as thought leaders—think #PodcastandChill and The Hustlers Corner—is upon us.
Where laws and guns cannot reach
South African poet Don Mattera, who died in July, was the real deal—preferring to throw his lot in with the ignored and the undervalued. Unsurprisingly, his monumental life and work is undervalued too.
Police and power in South Africa
South African policing is a tool of social control and repression. Are democratic and humanistic alternatives possible? This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss.
The politics of pathology
By using healthcare to attack immigrants, xenophobic political movements in South Africa echo long-standing right-wing obsessions.
We need to talk about wage theft
South African companies can afford to pay their workers a living wage—if not for their commitment to profit shifting, as the case of Lonmin and Marikana showed.
Apartheid of a special type
The Israel/Palestine system meets the definition of apartheid in international law, but presents different challenges for the campaign against it than was the case for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
The Bisho March and the Leipzig Option
Revisionist histories of South Africa’s transition to democracy are overdue, like on the deadly march on Bisho in the Ciskei homeland on 7 September 1992.
Denouncing the reader
Zoë Wicomb thinks she knows why black South African readers appreciate Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel 'The Promise' (2021) whilst many white readers were turned off by it.
On safari
Our annual publishing break coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Marikana massacre. We are planning a public event on August 20th to reflect on its legacies.
The afterlives of Marikana
Why do representative bodies like the union, the party, and the so-called Left seem to fail its constituents during struggles like Marikana?
Confronting police power
Accountability—insofar as it ever existed within the South African Police Service—has been reduced to a merely theoretical concept. It is time this changed.