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2 months ago | 
mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Richard Pithouse
Modern racism went global after it was invented in the slave colony of Virginia, in what is now the United States, in the latter part of the 17th century. It is now being actively retrofitted through a set of right-wing networks that have cohered around the White House. It will probably have to be defeated in the US, but with South Africa in its crosshairs we are not mere spectators to the Trumpage. There can be no equivocation on Trump’s racism.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Richard Pithouse
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, stepped out of the stifling conventions of European poetry and into an expansive form of free verse appropriate, he thought, to the democratic spirit of the United States. The eighth poem, I Sing the Body Electric, scandalised Victorian sensibilities with its embrace of an embodied sense of joy and freedom.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Des Erasmus |Richard Pithouse
The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez radicalised Catholicism, enabling a flourishing of emancipatory energies from Latin America to the Caribbean and South AfricaKarl Marx did not only say that religion is “the opium of the people”. He preceded that observation by describing religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
businesslive.co.za | Richard Pithouse
Many of the recollections of Pravin Gordhan’s life have gone back to the time of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the ANC underground, most notably Operation Vula. From the growth of the trade union movement after the Durban strikes in 1973 through to the community struggles that cohered around the UDF after its founding in Cape Town in 1983, the day-to-day work of organising was central to the growing popular confrontation with apartheid.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
businesslive.co.za | Richard Pithouse
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers. People walk between shacks in Diepsloot. Picture: ANTONIO MUCHAVE/SOWETAN In 2005 the wheel of human history turned and for the first time the majority of us lived in cities. At the time the UN estimated that about 1-billion people, a quarter of the world’s urban population, lived in shacks.
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Sep 14, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Nompumelelo Vumazonke |Richard Pithouse
The decision by the supreme court in Brazil to uphold a judgment to shut down X in the country is a significant challenge to the extraordinary planetary power of the tech companies. The ban was in response to the failure of Elon Musk’s X Corp, which owns X, to appoint a legal representative in Brazil, a requirement in Brazilian law. This followed the refusal of X Corp to follow a judicial order to block accounts spreading patently false information.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
businesslive.co.za | Richard Pithouse
On July 18 Coreth Naudé, an advocate acting for the SA Revenue Service in an inquiry into celebrity Shauwn Mkhize, survived an assassination attempt in uMhlanga after being shot three times. On July 11 Zenzele Benedict Sithole, who worked in an anti-corruption unit in the City of Johannesburg, was shot dead in the CBD, and on June 21 Matthew Horwill, a manager in a construction company, survived an attempted hit in Pinetown.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Richard Pithouse
KwaZulu-Natal is, consistently, the worst province for police killings as well as political assassinations. The police admit to having killed 142 people in the province last year, just over 30% of the national total of 448 people. The real figures must be higher. Official figures indicated that the South African police kill more than twice the number of people per capita than the police in the United States, according to research in 2021 by Paul T Clarke, a doctoral student at Harvard.
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Jul 13, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Richard Pithouse
A few days before the recent election in France two young people from Johannesburg studying in Europe were told to “go home” in a bar in Paris. A brazenly racist pop song including lyrics such as “good riddance — and don’t come back” had gone viral on TikTok and opinion polls indicated that the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) would win the coming election. The RN, previously known as the Front National, has its roots in French colonialism and collaboration with fascism.
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Jun 27, 2024 | 
mg.co.za | Richard Pithouse |Des Erasmus
All other things being equal, most Mail & Guardian readers would prefer to live in societies that grant them the standard set of liberal social and political rights. This is not in dispute nor is the need to defend these rights where they are operative, and to extend them to people to whom they are denied.
