Geography Archives: South Africa

July is mid–winter in the Southern Hemisphere, where Billie Holiday singing “like a summer with a thousand Julys” rings somewhat oddly. Just the same, there was plenty of fire to keep people warm this winter.

Malibongwe Mdazo, an organizer of National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, who had led a 7,000-worker strike last month, was publicly gunned down at the doorstep of Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, amidst a labor dispute on August 19.

FoodForward SA closes branches nationwide because of insecurity.

The other side of ecocide thrives in the fertile ground of radical socioecological theory.

As rioters target supermarkets, activists call on the government to help those who cannot survive amid rising prices and mass unemployment.

A battle by a business that ‘privately’ grew and prepared cannabis for clients, to have this service declared lawful, landed in the Western Cape high court this week–this as police clamped down on another dagga laboratory.

A vaccine alone will not be enough to end the pandemic as it must also be made available at an affordable price and allocated in a way that achieves equity. It follows that suspending intellectual property rights related to COVID-19 is the most appropriate solution to our current situation of global vaccine apartheid.

On three days last week–December 23-25–South Africa’s east coast province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) lost three of its clearest voices for social justice and environmental sanity: rural women’s leader Sizani Ngubane (74), trade unionist Patrick Mkhize (60) and progressive activist Faith ka-Manzi (52).

Veteran of the fight against Apartheid RONNIE KASRILS warns that the IHRA is being used to suppress left-wing supporters of Palestine, just as anti-communist hysteria was used against the national-liberation movement in South Africa

In the 1980s, after Mozambique won its independence from Portugal in 1974, the South African apartheid regime and the settler-colonial army of Rhodesia backed an anti-communist faction against the government of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO).

He constantly experimented with and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor and oppressed with the radical transformation of society.

The United States government has continued attacking Cuban medical internationalism right up to the current pandemic, making wild allegations against the program that disparage the medical workers.

In his famous speech from the dock in April 1964, Nelson Mandela spoke of ‘revolutionary democracy’ rooted in precolonial forms of collective deliberation and decision making.

More than 1,450 men and women in white lab coats from Cuba’s Henry Reeve Contingent have traveled to 22 nations in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East to battle the pandemic.

The lockdown in South Africa has been extended till the end of April. However, the government’s execution of the lockdown, along with decades of under-investment in health, has left the country unprepared.

The word catastrophe is being used more and more by institutions reporting on the effects of extreme weather in the two regions of Africa, Southern and South Eastern Africa, and of late Australia. The word means a number of things: tragic; fiasco; utter failure; sudden and violent change in a feature of the Earth. All are completely fitting for the situation we now face.

This dossier is dedicated to offering an assessment of the moment we find ourselves in today. Part 1 provides a quick overview of planetary affairs; and Part 2 there are more detailed reports from our offices on their respective regions: South Africa, India, as well as the Caribbean and Latin America.

Since 1996, activists in Xolobeni, a coastal region in South Africa, have been fighting a foreign mining conglomerate that learned that their ancestral lands happen to be rich in titanium. The anti-mining activists of Xolobeni, who have lost many comrades to hit squads, continue to struggle against this foreign company and its partners in the South African government. Given that their land is located in a global biodiversity hotspot, their struggle is the struggle of us all: it is the fight for water, soil, food, and air.

It’s going take a fully democratic anti-capitalist movement to fight climate change. The case of South Africa shows how long we have to go.

The Industrial & Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU)—a trade union, rural peasant movement, and urban squatters’ movement—formed on the docks in Cape Town in 1919. Within a decade, the ICU had expanded across Southern Africa without regard for national borders and counted people from various African countries and the Caribbean in its leadership, as well as people who were Indian and mixed race. The largely forgotten history of the ICU is well worth recovering in a time of escalating chauvinism and xenophobia. Our Dossier #20 offers an introduction to this extraordinary popular movement.