Africa

By PENNY SWIFT Less than a week after publication of a heritage impact assessment (HIA) on an iconic haunted ghost house on the M4 near Durban, the building was razed to the ground. The demolition was ordered by the local eThekwini Council that had previously demanded the owner, Saantha Naidu Group of Companies, either restore the building or bulldoze it because it …

By PENNY SWIFT A controversial but much celebrated, award winning three-story floating school built on the Lagos Lagoon in 2013 has collapsed following torrential rain. Constructed as a prototype to show how floating buildings could improve the lives of the impoverished Makoko community, it was designed by Kunlé Adeyemi, a Nigerian architect, as a school. Called the Makoko Floating School, it …

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 South Carolina Charleston was founded as Charles Town in 1670 …

By ALEXANDER O’RIORDAN Last night Sepp Blatter resigned after 17 years in the position as president of football’s global governing body, FIFA. The resignation was to be expected since American criminal investigators last week indicted a host of FIFA executives on charges related to corruption and wire fraud. Notably, these charges allege that South Africa paid over a R100 million ($10 million) …

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. This is not a new phenomenon. When popular organisation arrogates …

As Latin America’s Pink Tide sweeps across Europe, what are the prospects for a more progressive brand of politics in South Africa? By FAZILA FAROUK Analysts argue that the expulsion of Zwelinzima Vavi and Numsa from Cosatu, by a faction sympathetic to President Jacob Zuma, have clear consequences for a major re-alignment of labour in South Africa. Perhaps more importantly, …

By FEMKE BRANDT The Labour Relations Amendment Act of 2014 (Section 198 of the LRA) introduces important new rights for labour broker, contract and part-time workers. Two issues emerge in relation to how these new labour rights affect farmworkers in the Karoo. Firstly, it is highly unlikely that the amendments will improve the lives of farmworkers directly. The introduction of …

  By DALE McKINLEY Amongst its many other attributes, South Africa could arguably be called the commission capital of the world. While there is no official list of how many commissions of inquiry there have been in the 20 years since 1994, suffice to say that the numbers are impressive. In the last 14 years alone there have been no …

BY JANE DUNCAN In the broader scheme of things, how significant are the recent wave of protests that have engulfed South Africa over the past decade? Are they another means of pressurising the ruling African National Congress (ANC) into delivering better services, or do they represent a new form of anti-systemic politics that promises to change how society is organised, …

By STEVEN FRIEDMAN If that well-worn cliché about never wasting a crisis applies to anything, it is the labour movement today. Contrary to some current rhetoric, the movement does not need to return to what it was: it needs to become something different. Deepening tensions in Cosatu, which saw the departure of the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) and now …