South Africa

By Patrick Bond

January 1, 2013 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Either:

1) Africa owes its takeoff to a variety of accelerators, nearly all of them external and occurring in the past 10 years:

• billions of dollars in aid, especially to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria;

• tens of billions of dollars in foreign-debt cancellations;

• a concurrent interest in Africa’s natural resources, led by China; and

• the rapid spread of mobile phones, from a few million in 2000 to more than 750 million today.

Business increasingly dominates foreign interest in Africa. Investment first outpaced aid in 2006 and now doubles it.

Or:

Lover of fast cars, vintage wine, trout fishing and game farming and the second richest black businessperson in South Africa (global financi

By Terry Bell

December 5, 2012 –

Thousands of Amplats mineworkers rally in Rustenburg, South Africa.

By Leonard Gentle

President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, India

Storm surge from the cyclone in Durban, March 2007.

By Patrick Bond

SACP's Blade Nzimande leads COSATU members prior to clashes with striking Anglo Platinum miners.

Marikana miners protest against the August 16, 2012, massacre by police.

Karl Cloete addresses NUMSA's February 2012

Graphic from the Economist.

By Patrick Bond

[Address to the Muslim Youth Movement 40th Anniversary Conference, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, September 30, 2012. Posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission.]

At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends. – Former US president Jimmy Carter, 25 June 2012, New York Times