part of no part

The Coloured question has been back in the media with a vengeance again lately. This has been a debate that I have avoided with great angst, not only because it is a personal embarrassment to me to be grossly lumped into an anomalous grouping created by Colonial masters as a means to degrade and control me, but also because the debate is so deeply rooted in colonial tropes and framing and because most conversations about race have been shallow, generally bigoted and anachronistic and thus unable to help us to navigate toward a decolonised outcome. This truth was brought home to me again when Wanelisa Xaba, a self-proclaimed “radical feminist and decolonial thinker”, recently posted an article calling on us to talk about the violent anti blackness of coloureds . This was shortly after I had read a Facebook post by respected journalist and activist Zenzile Khoisan who warned of an “ uprising brewing among the Khoi and San descendants ” and a heartfelt lament by Nicole Van Driel a...

Standing in the glare of a media contingent that almost overshadowed the collected delegates to the #OperationRecapture! Conference, Sipho Pityana, the leader of the Save South Africa organisation and corporate executive, breathed fire, as he called on all South Africans to stand up to the evil force of corruption. He noted that Members of Parliament would be asked to vote on the 8 th of August and that this conference would have to come up with strategies to pressure MP`s into voting in the interest of the people of South Africa. He spoke of how the conference would have to break the nexus between big business and politicians in order to overcome the corruption which was now apparently so inherent in the current administration. Even though we are from different ideological and material backgrounds, he shouted from the podium, we needed to make common cause in order to ensure that we redefine power relationships and that we build peoples power to advance the peoples agend...

The modern party political system, for all its claims at being the pinnacle of democratic expression in liberal society has nonetheless produced the contradiction of a state that stands “above and outside of society” as Hannah Arendt, the esteemed 20 th century philosopher so aptly pointed out. In South Africa, that point is poignantly illustrated by the attempts at deep soul searching that has played itself out at the ANC National Policy Conference in Nasrec over the last week. The ANC has come face to face with the reality that no matter how noble an organisation or Party`s intentions are, the exercise of power and wealth, without the sobering limitations of a deeply democratic structure, inevitably leads to the development and rise of a political class that soon alienates the state and the party from the people it once represented. At the centre of the malaise which currently drives the steep descent of the ANC from a once proud and noble liberation movement to an o...

*This article first appeared in  http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/opinion/whose-narrative-is-it-anyway-9852504 (Cape Times and iol) The Political discourse both in South Africa, and indeed globally has over the past 3 decades, become increasingly plural in nature with a growing sense among most that everything is relative and that my truth is not necessarily your truth and vice versa. This is significantly different from the cold-war era or the during the Apartheid years when political and economic discourse was decidedly more binary and revolved around two great narratives of either the West or the East, either for Apartheid or against Apartheid. After the cold- war ended, the world`s leading philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama argued that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. Since then, Western liberal democracy has indeed been on the ascent and the worl...

* This article first appeared in the following publications:   http://www.news24.com/Columnists/GuestColumn/mining-charter-reflects-what-ails-sa-20170616 ( City Press and News24 Online) https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/opinion-and-analysis/2017-06-24-elite-friendly-mining-charter-flatters-to-deceive-favouring-patronage-networks/ ( Sunday Times and Timeslive) From a Minister picked from obscurity to do the bidding of a powerful patronage network, to the entrenchment of elite capture of the mineral wealth of the country, the latest Mining Charter flatters to deceive. Like the story of post 1994 South Africa, it leads only to deeper inequalities. On the face of it, the Charter speaks of increased Black South African representation in the ownership structures of corporate mining and greater economic opportunities for black South Africans in the hitherto white and foreign-dominated value chain of the industry. The Apartheid system viciously excluded the...