Since the 1920s Charleston has been the name of a dance; a dance with roots in Africa, and made white and famous on Broadway. Now Charleston is the name of a massacre, the murder of nine people and the desecration of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. About Charleston and …
Read More »Reason after Liberalism
Comment by RICHARD PITHOUSE In recent days and weeks the liberal consensus on which the post-apartheid order was founded has been burnt away like morning mist giving way to the heat of the rising sun. From our liberal universities to the streets of Durban and Johannesburg, liberal values have been spurned. …
Read More »Rhodes Must Fall
A commitment to changing society must include an openness to the unexpected moment in which new modes of politics appear By RICHARD PITHOUSE If you’re up early in Dakar and decide to take a walk along the shorefront before the day gets going you may see fishermen setting out on …
Read More »Land, Dignity & Democracy: South Africa’s Constitution Does Allow for Expropriation
By RICHARD PITHOUSE At a public discussion on the land question in Johannesburg on Friday, February 27, Dikgang Moseneke, the Deputy Chief Judge of the Constitutional Court, began his remarks with a well-known quote from Frantz Fanon: For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is …
Read More »On Not Reducing Racism to Apartheid
By RICHARD PITHOUSE We would be more effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be repressed and its consequences in the …
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