South African Workers’ Rise Up

The Vast Minority

Reports The Guardian: “South Africa‘s president, Jacob Zuma, is facing one of the biggest tests of his presidency as tens of thousands of striking workers took to the streets and relations with his union backers neared breaking point.

“There were demands for Zuma, who was thousands of miles away at the World Expo in Shanghai during a state visit to China, to return home as cities were paralysed by marching public sector workers.

The Work of Violence: a timeline of armed attacks at Kennedy Road

School of Development Studies Research Report, 83, July 2010.

by Kerry Chance

On 26 September 2009, violent attacks by an armed group left two men dead and an estimated thousand displaced at the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the South African city of Durban.

UK to deport Swazi Activist

FROM THE ZIMBABWE VIGIL

Media Release – 14^th August 2010

UK to deport Swazi Activist

The most prominent Swazi pro-democracy activist in the UK, Thobile Gwebu, has been detained by the UK immigration authorities and is due to be deported as a failed asylum seeker on Tuesday 17^th August at 20.30.( She is to be flown to Johannesburg from Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic flight number VS601. For contact details see below.)

How to write about Haiti

Ansel Hertz, Huffington Post

Actor Sean Penn, who is helping manage a camp of displaced earthquake victims in Haiti, is making pointed criticisms of journalists for dropping the ball on coverage of Haiti. He’s wrong. I’ve been on the ground in Port-au-Prince working as an independent journalist for the past ten months. I’m an earthquake survivor who’s seen the big-time reporters come and go. They’re doing such a stellar job and I want to help out, so I’ve written this handy guide for when they come back on the one-year anniversary of the January quake!

South Africa: Serving our Life Sentence in the Shacks

People all over South Africa have been asking the leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo as to why the government continues to ignore the demands of the shack dwellers. They have been asking why after all the marches, statements, reports and meetings the Kennedy Road settlement continues to get burnt down through the endless shack fires.

They have been referring in particular to the recent Kennedy Road shack fire on Sunday, 4 July 2010 that took four lives, leaving more than three thousand people displaced and homeless.

Censorship and Karl Marx

by John Higgins, Business Day

Free press needed to shatter the state’s ‘arrogant illusion’

With this striking image — “a people’s statute book is its bible of freedom” — a young journalist reminded the public of the threat to democracy posed by new censorship laws introduced in 19th- century Germany.

Against him stood politicians, who argued that the new censorship mechanisms — described of course as intended to improve press freedom — were “a lesser evil than the excesses of the press”; others who “repudiated freedom of the press as tactless, indiscreet speech”; and still others who, though personally “disposed in favour of freedom of the press”, couldn’t allow themselves to demonstrate public support for it on account of their “feelings of dependence” on the government of the day.