South Africa
Musical interlude: Abdullah Ibrahim's Mannenberg (Is Where It's Happening)
Mannenberg
Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) is seen here visiting Mandela's cell on Robben Island, and wandering in and around Cape Town -- including the famed District Six and Mannenberg -- to the soundtrack of his now classic South African jazz tune Mannenberg (Is Where It's Happening).
Migrant workers in South Africa: Photography and social justice struggles
Born in Durban and the author of a forthcoming book on Wentworth in Durban, Peter Mckenzie was a co-founder of the photo collective Afrapix agency under the auspices of the South African Council of Churches and the chief
South Africa: The new apartheid
Part 2
Part 3
Xenophobia tears apart South Africa's working class
By Thandokuhle Manzi and Patrick Bond
May 26, 2008 -- The low-income black township here in Durban which suffered more than any other during apartheid, Cato Manor, was the scene of a test performed on a Mozambican last Wednesday morning (May 21). At 6:45am, in the warmth of a rising subtropical winter sun, two unemployed men strolling on Belair Road approached the middle-aged immigrant. They accosted him and demanded, in the local indigenous language isiZulu, that he say the word meaning ``elbow'' (this they referred to with their hand). The man answered ``idolo'', which unfortunately means ``knee''. The correct answer is ``indololwane''. His punishment: being beaten up severely, and then told to ``go home''.
March against xenophobia, Johannesburg, May 24, 2008.
ISRAEL: Washington backs Middle East's `nuclear outlaw'
Norm Dixon
March 24, 2004 -- “Every civilised nation has a stake in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction... We’re determined to confront those threats at the source”, US President George Bush declared in a February 11 speech.
“We will stop these weapons from being acquired or built. We’ll block them from being transferred. We’ll prevent them from ever being used. One source of these weapons is dangerous and secretive regimes that build weapons of mass destruction to intimidate their neighbours and force their influence upon the world.”
Arguing for combative new “arms control” measures that would further entrench the West’s control over nuclear weapons, Bush casually repeated the now thoroughly exposed lie that the US-led war against Iraq was launched because Baghdad “refused to disarm or account for ... illegal weapons and programs”.
Bush used the speech to signal that Iran remains in Washington’s gun-sights, alleging that Tehran “is unwilling to abandon a uranium enrichment program capable of producing material for nuclear weapons”. Bush also demanded that North Korea “completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear programs”.
The transformation of South Africa's communists
12 February 1997
Raising the Red Flag: The International Socialist League and the Communist Party of South Africa 1914-1932
By Sheridan Johns
Mayibuye Books, Bellville, South Africa
1995, 309pp.
Review by Norm Dixon
Mayibuye Books specialise in publishing works relating to South Africa's liberation struggle, most by participants in the movement. Under apartheid many valuable works were suppressed. Now free to publish anything, it may seem strange that Mayibuye would decide to publish a book that began as an unpublished thesis by an obscure US academic 30 years ago. Strange or not, it is a decision to be welcomed.
BHP-Billiton: a corporation founded on apartheid plunder
25 April 2001
BY NORM DIXON
In late March, newspaper headlines hailed the announcement that giant Australian-owned mining, oil and steel corporation BHP and the huge Anglo-South African mining a
South Africa: A victory for workers' solidarity with the Zimbabwean people
By Patrick Craven, COSATU
April 22, 2008 -- The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the statement by a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman that the China Ocean Shipping Company which owns the An Yue Jiang, has decided to recall the ship because Zimbabwe cannot take delivery of the 77 tonnes of weapons and ammunition onboard.
If true, this is an historic victory for the international trade union movement and civil society, and in particular for the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), whose members refused to unload or transport its deadly cargo.
Protest banner being removed from China's Pretoria embassy.
Climate change solutions: what role for the market? & Equity in energy consumption -- Patrick Bond
Two talks by Patrick Bond, delivered at the Climate Change Social Change Conference, Sydney, April 12, 2008.
Climate change solutions: what role for the market?
John Pilger on South Africa: Honouring the 'unbreakable promise'
March 28, 2008 -- Fourteen years after South Africa's first democratic elections and the fall of racial apartheid, John Pilger describes, in an address at Rhodes University, the dream and reality of the new South Africa and the responsibility of its new elite. (See video clips of John Pilger's visit here.)
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By John Pilger
On my wall in London is a photograph I have never grown tired of looking at. Indeed, I always find it thrilling to behold. You might even say it helps keep me going. It is a picture of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the notorious ‘hippos’, as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised. Her fists are clenched. Her thin body is both beckoning and defiant of the enemy. It was May Day 1985 and the uprising against apartheid had begun.
15 years since the murder of Chris Hani
On April 10, 1993, South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Chris Hani was asassinated by right-wing extremists hoping to derail South Africa's transtion to democratic rule. On the 15th anniversary of his death, Links reproduces a speech by socialist and African National Congress (ANC) veteran Pallo Jordan delivered to mark the 10th anniversary of the assassination.
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By Dr Pallo Jordan
Allow me first to thank the leadership of the SACP and the central executive committee of Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) for inviting me to deliver this inaugural Chris Hani Memorial Lecture. I consider it a great honour to have been chosen for this task because Comrade Chris was a close and very dear friend of mine.