The recent riots are an attempt to force change after years of neglect by a state that has remained aloof and uninterested in the economic and social dispossession of the African majority.
If there is no material justice and investment in healing the generations of harm enacted onto South Africans, the rot in the country's wounds will overcome them.
While the #FreeJacobZuma campaign is the catalyst, the violence has been fuelled by deep-rooted inequality, poverty, unemployment, trauma.
To riff off James Baldwin, there will be a fire next time in South Africa. The embers and kindling are in place. What matters is what South Africans do between this fire and the next.
After the manifest failure of microcredit to address poverty in Africa and everywhere else, the international development community has hit upon a new microcredit-related idea that, it claims, will do the job this time around: ‘fin-tech’, i.e. financial technology. As Milford Bateman argues in this article that fin-tech has the potential to gravely undermine the position of the poor and to increase inequality while, not coincidentally, vastly enriching a narrow elite.
In his new book, the Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani argues that breaking cycles of violence requires collective action. He finds hope in the unfinished project of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle.
How kleptocrat rulers in African countries sell out their resources to international partners, deprive citizens and enrich themselves
A full confession can bring amnesty and immunity from prosecution or civil procedures for the crimes committed. Therein lies the central irony. As people give more and more evidence of the things they have done they get closer and closer to amnesty and it gets more and more intolerable that these people should be given amnesty.
In a far-reaching long-read, writer and commentator Yusuf Serunkuma argues that ‘democracy’ in Africa is not just a language of (colonial) exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Our challenge today, is to understand the colonial nature of this democracy – divide and rule, shameless free markets, foreign aid, and loans & media bombardment – and the myriad, so-called good-intentioned crusaders who promote it.
Anyone who lives in fear of getting sick exists in a state of unfreedom.
Assuming today’s socioeconomic crisis benefits the Left is folly. That will only happen if we have the political vision to make class the fault line of social polarisation, and for that we need to face the challenge of constructing a new party.
African universities must transform higher education. At stake is the future of the African continent and humanity itself, as much of this humanity becomes increasingly African.