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In July 1981, 1,700 workers at the Penge asbestos mine in the Northwestern Transvaal struck after a bitter, two year struggle for recognition by the Black Allied Mine and Construction Workers Union. After four days, the mine owners fired all of the workers, who then...
James Ngculu joined Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) after the 1976 uprising of Soweto. He occupied a variety of posts within MK and spent most of his time abroad in exile, where he became one of Chris Hani's closest companions. After 1994, he acted as the Provincial Secretary...
We are told that «A green economy can be thought of as one which is low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive» (see www.unep.org/greeneconomy). We are also told that It will stop climate change and the extinction of species and in so doing will create high...
Why is President Jacob Zuma and the JSC imposing Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng as our chief justice when he is clearly unsuitable for the position? South Africa’s Constitution requires the Constitutional Court and all others to interpret, protect and enforce the fundamental...
Amid the logic-destroying hysteria surrounding Brett Murray’s (now defaced) The Spear, the Film and Publications Board will sit to decide if personal dignity trumps art and freedom of expression. Eighteen years into South Africa’s democracy and our censorship system...
Nhlanhla Mtaka says the Spear controversy has unmasked us as a nation From tolerance to acceptance: The controversy over the Zuma painting has revealed us all to be racists In his book The Other Side of History: An Anecdotal Reflection on Political Transition in South...
A review of Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic, 2010), £9.99 Given Hitchens’s political inconsistencies, Hitch-22 is better than it ought to be, a fact which is a consequence of his undeniable talent A petty bourgeois individualist, in his last years...
This week the world witnessed a heated debate around Brett Murray’s painting exposing SA president Jacob Zuma’s genitals. Those in defense of Murray argued that this was purely an artistic act, while those in favour of Zuma argued that it was merely the work of a...
There's no question that the debate, in and around the media, ignited by the ANC's response to Brett Murray's painting has been voluminous and intense in equal measure. And there have been important insights and lessons learned amongst the sound and fury. But the way...