part of no part

After being threatened with legal action by Section 27 and the Khiba School in Kuruman to force various departments of governments to act on its own findings, the Department of Labour has finally acted in the interest of teachers under its scope and issued a notice to the school to deal with the Asbestos contamination or face permanent closure.  The Departments of Mineral Resources, Education and Environment and Tourism have still not deemed it important enough to act. The question of Asbestos exposure is however a much larger and exceedingly deadly humanitarian crises facing South Africa and one which requires government to account and to act immediately. The first recorded commercial mining of amphibole asbestos began in the early 1880s. By the mid-nineteenth century, the South African industry produced 97% of the world's crocidolite and asbestos constituted one of South Africa's most valuable base minerals. When the last amphibole mine closed a century later,...

I was travelling in the backwaters of rural Kuruman today in the Ga Segonyana district. Ga Segonyana is just adjacent to the Joe Morolong District of Kuruman, which is currently experiencing a school boycott, in which parents have kept their children from school for over three months to demand that government tar a road which runs through their communities. I was impressed by some of the good work government has undertaken to provide clinics, roads and electricity to these rural communities. And Yet there was so much that shocked me to the core.,In the village of Dithoswaneng, learners attend school with hungry stomachs. Most come from child headed households or live with their gogos (Grand mothers). Many simply end up taking exploitative informal jobs like collecting scrap and eventually dropping out of school. Because the need to feed the family comes first. Or the school in Gasehubane Village, which has a school built in the heart of an asbestos mining area and built with a...

“ Niggas talk about change and working within the system to achieve that. The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system; it's the system that will eventually change you…No matter how much you want to dye your hair blonde and put fake eyes in, or follow an anorexic standard of beauty, or no matter how many diamonds you buy from people who exploit your own brutally to get them, no matter what kind of car you drive or what kind of fancy clothes you put on, you will never be them. They're always gonna look at you as nothing but a little monkey. I'd rather be proud of what I am, rather than desperately trying to be something I'm really not , just to fit in. And whether we want to accept it or not, that's what this culture or lack of culture is feeding us...   There is usually nothing wrong with compromise in a situation, but compromising yourself in a situation is another st...

Pixley Ka Isaka Seme, the founder of the African National Congress, explained the purpose of the first conference of what was to become the ANC, in these words: “ Chiefs of royal blood and gentlemen of our race, we have gathered here to consider and discuss a scheme which my colleagues and I have decided to place before you. We have discovered that in the land of their birth, Africans are treated as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South Africa - a union in which we have no voice in the making of laws and no part in their administration. We have called you, therefore, to this conference, so that we can together devise ways and means of forming our national union for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges. ” It is an irony then, that 20 years after the dawn of democracy, that Black Africans are still not afforded their rightful place in the making of laws an...

There can be little doubt that the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels have engaged, politicians, academics, economists, feminists, working class people and organisations for over 150 years, and has in many instances shaped the worlds political outcomes if not its economic outcomes in various ways. South Africa is no exception. Many have pronounced the death of Marx and his ideas over the 150 years of its unstinting analyses and critique of the Capitalist mode of production. Talcott Parsons(Parsons, 1967), at the same time as Marxism was experiencing a revival of Marxist thought across the globe, dismissed it as a theory whose significance was entirely confined to the nineteenth century. Though, according to Michael Burawoy(Burawoy, 2013) the revival did not last long, suffering setbacks through repression, dictatorship and then by market fundamentalism. It was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn to the market in China, that really brought the gravediggers out in t...

In the mining villages of Ga-Pila where Anglo Platinum continues to profit from land grabbed from the traditional communities just west of Mokopane, the appointment of the new Minister of Mineral Resources, Ngoako Ramathlodi , has been met with a sense of betrayal. Ramatlhodi, Premier of Limpopo province from 1994 to 2004, was considered to have had inside knowledge that Angloplat were intending to use Sterkwater-De Hoogedoorns for its mining expansion and community resettlement programme. Ramatlhodi’s part in the 1996 purchase of a farm near an Anglo Platinum mine in Limpopo was partly obscured by the fact that a close corporation acted as the buyer. Ngoako Properties sold the farm two-and-a-half years later to Angloplat for the company’s controversial resettlement of communities affected by the mines operations. The communities of Ga-Pila, Ga-Puka, Ga-Molekane and Ga-Chaba continue to resist the land grabs by AngloPlat and will once again march on the Mogalakwena mine on Tu...

“Let me at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It is the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies…Many may not have rationalised it, may not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it.” Jimmy Reid, Clydesdale trade unionist, after being elected as rector of Glasgow University. April 1994, that moment under the African sun, when South Africans, young and old, the healthy and the infirm, queued in seemingly endless lines at polling stations to cast their vote in a democratic process ,  a vote that would at long last, signal their enfranchisement, and the end of centuries of exploitation, oppression and disenfranchisement. In a word, it would be t...