Entries Tagged as ‘politics’

3 July 2008

Tribute to Xenophobia Victims

The South African pioneers of African freedom, like Tiyo Soga, Pixley kaIsaka Seme and J.J. Xaba would never have stood for xenophobia, President Thabo Mbeki said at a gathering in Tshwane this afternoon.
He was speaking at the National Tribute in Remembrance of the Victims of Attacks on Foreign Nationals and South Africans held in the [...]

20 June 2008

Moral degeneration

In a piece tagged “doom and gloom” The Shrieking Man writes about what one can only call the moral degeneration in South African society, which he attributes to a lack of shared values. And if this continues, he says, the future is bleak
what is coming is an atomised capitalist anti-community where divisions grow rather [...]

13 June 2008

Liberals and liberalism

Liberals tend to get a bad press nowadays. Those who dislike liberalism often no longer even bother to try to justify their dislike — it is enough to simply use the word “liberal” as an epithet to condemn the person in their eyes. The enemies of liberalism, on both the left and the right, have [...]

11 June 2008

Sex and skin

Sex and skin — that’s what the US Democratic Party’s primary race was all about, if one read South African newspapers last weekend. Her sex and his skin, but with the emphasis on the skin.
Nearly 15 years after the end of apartheid, it seems, the South African media still have not recovered from their obsession [...]

19 May 2008

Xenophobia — the gatvol factor

Xenophobia has been around for a long time in South Africa, but only when it hit Joburg did the media begin to sit up and take notice (see, on my other blog, Notes from underground: Time to rename Gauteng?). Then the moralising began, and the op-ed articles began to appear, and condemnations of those media [...]

17 May 2008

Christian civil disobedience

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the arrest of the Catonsville Nine, a group of Christian antiwar protesters who destroyed draft records of the Vietnam War.

clipped from www.baltimoresun.com

Forty years ago tomorrow, nine
committed followers of Christ entered the Selective Service Office
in Catonsville. They moved past
three surprised office workers,
who questioned what they were
doing but did not stop [...]

12 May 2008

What are they talking about on Amatomu?

I had a look at Amatomu, and the biggest thing in the Zeitgeist, that stuck out a mile, was mothers day.
I was curious, because I’ve always regarded Mothers Day as an American thing, and not very big in South Africa, but there it was on Amatomu, very big.
So I wondered just where people were talking [...]

6 May 2008

The Message to the people of South Africa — 40 years

In September it will be 40 years since the “Message to the people of South Africa” was published.
The “Message” was a comprehensive rejection of the apartheid policy of the South African government of the time on theological grounds.
While Christian groups had criticised apartheid previously, most of the earlier criticisms had not explicitly rejected the principles [...]

4 May 2008

Bloggers unite for human rights

On 15 May the usual crowd will be having a synchroblog on the theme of human rights, but this time we will be joining hundreds of other bloggers on the same theme. Obviously anyone is welcome to join, either in the synchroblog (which means having a list of links to other synchroblog posts) or to [...]

19 April 2008

Kosovan army harvested organs from Serb prisoners

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

Carla Del Ponte, the ex-chief prosecutor for war crimes in former Yugoslavia, has unleashed a storm of recrimination with allegations of a trade in human body parts in Kosovo and Albania after Nato bombed Serbia in 1999.
Del Ponte claims, based on what she describes as credible reports and witnesses, that Kosovan Albanian guerrillas [...]