Geography Archives: South Africa

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.

As the curate said, assessing a none-too-fresh boiled egg at breakfast: ‘It was good in parts.’

When the late South African artist Tito Zungu wanted to depict the world of the migrant labourer, he settled on the envelope. It was by infrequent letters that the migrant would be able to be in touch with family – letters dictated to professional letter writers at one end, which would be read out by professional letter readers at the other.

In this interview Gyekye Tanoh, head of the Political Economy Unit at the Third World Network-Africa based in Accra (Ghana), elaborates upon the themes of corporate plunder, resource nationalism and people-centered forms of resource management in Africa.

Over 25 years ago now the people of South Africa won the struggle to end the Apartheid regime. Nevertheless, even though it is now against the law, de facto racial segregation is still apparent.

The shack-dwellers’ movement– Abahlali baseMjondolo, or AbM— is among the organizations of the world’s poor and dispossessed fighting for land reform and dignity. Despite waves of repression by the state, AbM membership now numbers over 50,000 in settlements across the country since their founding in 2006. In an interview with Tricontinental Institute, Zikode talks about the essence of AbM—what they are fighting for, who they are, what they have achieved, and what we can learn from them.

Mike Peters explores the legacy of Steve Biko, a radical who spent his life fighting for Black liberation and for the overthrow of the Apartheid government in South Africa.

To this day, “NUMSA has not deviated from its perspective of Marxism, Leninism and its goal of building a socialist South Africa,” says Karl Cloete

The rise of extreme right wing politics is a response by sections of the ruling classes internationally to the economic stagnation.

Many here say that South Africa’s constitution has never been an impediment to land redistribution; the problem was always the political will of the ANC, which abandoned Marxist ideology for a neoliberal approach.

What’s happening in Cape Town now might soon happen to many places in the world. To prevent socio-ecological crises like this we need to manage our resources more rationally and collectively.

The capitalist crisis will deepen as new bubbles created by easy money begin to burst.

The New York Times, the world’s premier journalistic purveyor of a “fake,” imperial, and profoundly white capitalist world view — masquerading as all the news that’s fit to print — wants us to believe that a now-bankrupt London-based public relations firm is behind South Africa’s regime-shaking debate over the rule of “white monopoly capital.”

Comrades 2017 was a year where the global crisis of capitalism deepened. Just like the 2008 global financial crisis, capitalism demonstrated once more that it has failed humanity and has no solutions for problems that are confronting society.

The world joined most South Africans in cheering when Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison, the apartheid regime was largely dismantled, and multiracial elections were eventually held.

It takes a certain level of cynicism to race bait South Africans to protect profits. It’s downright underhanded to hire a public relations firm to do it professionally.

This whole project to hollow out institutions has only one aim which is the creation of a predatory state whose only reason for existence is to accumulate and plunder the country’s resources for the benefit of family members of Jacob Zuma, as well as the network of greedy, corrupt families who also benefit from crony capitalism.