The documentary, Cultivating Unemployment, uses the case study of Weenen, an agricultural community in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, to highlight the severe structural challenges facing rural communities and agricultural workers across South Africa. It provides a very necessary insight into an important part of the South African landscape that is often overlooked in policy decisions.
British colonialism, Apartheid policies and post-apartheid politics have all played a role in curbing and regressing the rights of a large section of the South African population. Unfortunately for 17 million rural South Africans there are plans afoot to disenfranchise them further via the introduction of the Traditional Courts Bill.
Our attitudes towards immigrants say more about ourselves and our national character than we probably realise. Rapidly increasing human migration is a reality of the modern global economy. Countries that figure out how to utilise the phenomenon to their advantage will be the economies of the future.
This is not an article about Nelson Mandela. It is a warning about the dangerous and dishonest attempts by many white South Africans to establish their democratic and human rights credentials in the eyes of the world. For them and many Western ‘liberals’ Mandela was not a man with many great qualities and a number of major flaws. For them he was a brand, to use as a smokescreen for their apathy towards the social ills that haunt this country and indeed many others across the world.
We have all amused ourselves by looking at articles and graphics imagining social media as a country, but what about the correlation between social media and political support? With South Africa’s next general election scheduled for a date between April and July next year, it may be an interesting exercise to see which South African political parties could be considered Twitterati and which ones come across as twits in the social media arena.
This is a long article, a very long article. It needs to be long because it addresses a critical issue that affects us all, be it as concerned environmentalist, tax payer, business owner or civic minded individual. The earth is heating up, polar bears are falling through the pack ice and Cape Town may soon be under water. On the other hand, energy generation is critical to a country’s development and the creation of employment. How we balance those two priorities will determine our quality of living for generations to come. In this article we try to understand the issues at stake, with special reference to the burgeoning wind farm industry in South Africa.
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Gandhi spent 21 years in South Africa fighting for justice for the Indian population. His struggles and victories in South Africa are analogous to the history of Indian South Africans as a whole. The modern Indian South African community is a vibrant and crucial part of the diverse South African social fabric, though its early history was filled with hardship and disenfranchisement.
Although small in size the South African Jewish community has played a rich and varied role in the country’s history. Today the 75,000 strong community is located overwhelmingly in the major cities, especially Johannesburg and Cape Town, but there was a time when Jewish pedlars roamed the country side, supplying remote settlements with a variety of hard to obtain necessities
