living

Marie Hutchzermeyer cities with slums

In the past decade South Africa has witnessed an upsurge in negative labelling of informal settlements in policies and programmes, the removal of informal settlements from strategic positions in the city, and even legislative amendments to facilitate such...

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Centenary of the 1913 Land Act | By Colin Bundy

Centenary of the 1913 Land Act | By Colin Bundy

Why consider the history of a hundred-year old law? Surely the Marikana massacre and farm-workers' strikes are more urgent? In fact, there are direct links between the Natives' Land Act of 1913 and current struggles. The Land Act and its consequences still shape rural...

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David and Goliath

David and Goliath

The story of farm workers and farm bosses in the Breede River Valley| by Mercia Andrews On Wednesday 6 March 2013 in Ashton, 180 km from Cape Town, people started gathering for a meeting early in the morning. Outside the library, one could observe the expensive...

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SATAWU splits

SATAWU splits

Internal tensions in the SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) surfaced in June 2012 when Gauteng provincial chairperson Liver Mngomezulu and his deputy Reuben Molefe were suspended from the union. The union alleged they had signed an unauthorised contract...

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COSATU at the crossroads

COSATU at the crossroads

This feature of Amandla! lays bare the conflict unfolding in COSATU. Tensions in SA's biggest labour movement play themselves out over the failure of the Polokwane project. The ANC's 2007 Polokwane Conference, which adopted a host of progressive policies, was supposed...

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Knowledge. The final frontier

Some suggest that unemployment rates are high because of laziness or a dependency effect created by social grants, but numerous studies have failed to find empirical support for these claims. The one drum of this kind that continues to be beaten is the claim that...

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Chávez’s Legacy | by Mark Weisbrot

Bertrand Russell once wrote about the American revolutionary Thomas Paine, "He had faults, like other men; but it was for his virtues that he was hated and successfully calumniated." This was certainly true of Hugo Chávez Frias, who was probably more demonized than...

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