South African Politics and Society

The following text is a response sent to an email dispatched to me by the Chairman of the exiled Oromo Parliamentarians who struggle for the Independence and Self-determination of the 5 millennia long Kushitic Ethiopian Nation of the Oromos.
The Hamitic - Kushitic Oromo Nation - due to criminal, inhuman and evil persecution conceived by the colonial powers (France, England and America) and executed by the colonially promoted barbaric and incestuous pseudo-Christian Abyssinians - lost their kingdoms and were engulfed within the Cemetery of Nations Fake Ethiopia, which consists in the world's most tyrannical realm and the location of the world's more abhorrent, more enduring, and more multifaceted genocides. There are more than 45 million Oromos in Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) and Kenya today, despite the notorious and pathetic falsehood propagated by Wikipedia.
The present text enumerates all the major points of historical distortion and falsification carried out and diffused by the colonial academia, mass media, and diplomats, as well as by their local agents and criminal executioners, i.e. the barbaric, incestuous and Anti-Christian tribes of Amhara and Tigray (: the Abyssinians), who usurped the fair name of Ethiopia, which historically denotes the land of North Sudan and the Kushitic Nation that prospered there either in the Antiquity or in the Christian Era. Both, the Oromos and the Arabic-speaking (but not Arab) populations of Northern-Central Sudan are the descendants of Ancient Sudan's (i.e. Ancient Ethiopia's) Kushitic populations.
Representative photographic documentation was herewith added to the text in order to better illustrate the topic.

Refutation of historical forgeries propagated by European colonials and incestuous Abyssinians
First published here:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/kushitic-oromos-ancestry-in-ethiopia-ancient-sudan-semitic-amharas-tigrays-abyssinians-ancestry-in-yemen/

Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk are the largest disasters suffered by South Africa in its military history. Yet, despite their enormity, Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk are little understood and hardly remembered. South Africa declared war on Germany on the 6 September 1939, after a bitter internal debate, amounting to a conflict between Afrikaner nationalists and those who supported the British Empire. South Africa’s political ambivalence and disunity ran parallel to her unpreparedness for war in every important department from the lack of vital coastal defences to the miniscule size of her army and air force and complete lack of a navy. The first six months of 1941 saw the South Africans play a significant part in completely defeating the Italian colonial forces in East Africa. However, the campaign was poor preparation for what the South Africans were to encounter in the North African Desert months later. South African troops spent their time rebuilding fortifications in Egypt rather than in essential training to acclimatise this “bush war” army to harsh desert conditions. In a reluctant political decision, the unprepared South Africans were committed to Operation Crusader. The inexperienced South Africans met up with the battle hardened Afrika Korps at Sidi Rezegh on 23 November 1941 and were annihilated in the face of overwhelming odds. In revisiting this forgotten battle, it has been found, using primary and secondary sources, that the South Africans extracted an enormous price on the German armour in what may have been the true turning point of Operation Crusader. In May 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps sallied forth in a series of lightning moves that demonstrated the Axis grip on combined operations and managed to isolate the vital port of Tobruk commanded by an inexperienced South African, Major General H. B. Klopper. His surrender in one day is often compared to the previous siege endured under similar circumstances, where the Australians managed to hold Rommel at bay for 244 days until the siege was lifted. Klopper’s surrender of Tobruk resulted in a political crisis for Winston Churchill and for Jan Smuts, as the fiasco caused considerable tension within the Allied camp and within South Africa. On re-examination, interesting facts have emerged from the primary source material, as to the state of the Tobruk defences and of its unfortunate commander and how the United Kingdom, acting in concert with South Africa, sought to suppress the true facts. Immediate post-war memory has been shaped and distorted by sensitive political considerations that affected relations between South Africa and the United Kingdom. Thereafter, the memory of Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk was relegated first by a nationalistic Afrikaner government and then since by a democratically elected government, both of which have seen very little use in incorporating these two milestones into the national memory.

After a brief chapter on early efforts at non-racial union organization and the labour upsurge of the 197Os, Baskin concentrates on the complex unity negotiations among the various unions involved in the formation of COSATU in November 1985. He describes the giant ...

In the week of following the Marikana massacre, on Thursday the 23rd August 2012,  I visited the Marikana Mine, in part to attend a prayer meeting, but also to go and visit the hill on which the massacre took place. This essay contains my reflections and thoughts after this visit. Essentially, the Marikana visit introduced me to an unfolding national nightmare and in a reversal of the famous "I have a dream" speech of Martin Luther King Junior, I concluded : "I have been to the mountaintop at Marikana and my eyes have seen the unpromised land - the land of my nightmares ...

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are increasingly challenged to demonstrate accountability and relevance, with reporting, monitoring and evaluation arguably having become development activities in their own right. Drawing on interviews and observation research, this article examines the impact of intensified monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements on a number of South African NGOs. M&E — and the types of expertise, vocabularies and practices it gives rise to — is an important area that is usually neglected in the study of NGOs but that significantly impacts on NGOs’ logic of operation. By focusing on three areas — data that are considered appropriate to conduct M&E, staffing and organizational cultures, and NGOs’ reformist relationships with other civil society organizations (CSOs) — M&E is revealed as a central discursive element in the constitution of NGOs appropriate to neoliberal development. By engaging a neo-Foucauldian framework of governmentality, M&E practices are thus understood as technologies through which governing is accomplished in the trans-scalar post-apartheid development domain.

Presentation delivered as a guest seminar at the University of Cape Town's Department of Political Science (9th September, 2014). The presentation discusses a path of post-authoritarian transition in Poland, and it asks questions about similarities and differences between Polish case and South African democratization after the fall of apartheid regime. It focuses on three comparative categories: reconciliation, truth and forgiveness, and national unity.

South Africa is a highly distributively unequal country, and its inequality continues to be largely along racial lines. Such circumstances call for assessment from the perspective of contemporary theories of distributive justice. Three such theories – Rawlsian justice, utilitarianism, and luck egalitarianism – are described and applied. Rawls’ difference principle recommends that the worst off be made as well as they can be, a standard which South Africa clearly falls short of. Utilitarianism recommends the maximization of overall societal well-being, a goal which South Africa again fails to achieve given its severe inequality and the fact of the diminishing marginal value of money – that a given amount of money tends to produce more utility for a poor person than it does for a rich person. The final theory, luck egalitarianism, aims to make distributions sensitive to individual exercises of responsibility. This view also objects to South Africa’s inequality, this time on the basis that the poor are overwhelmingly worse off through no fault or choice of their own. These major theories of distributive justice therefore all propose large scale redistribution to the benefit of the (predominantly black) poor. Perhaps more surprisingly, all three views also provide support for class-based affirmative action, as opposed to South Africa’s race-based Black Economic Empowerment.

The demand for healing appears to produce a kind of ‘market for healing.’ It is often not possible to evaluate healing’s effectiveness, utility, or economic efficiency (‘value for money’), however, The market for healing, therefore, is governed less by price than by a parallel market for belief.  In the Umjindi (Barberton) municipality, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, medical choices are made on the basis of belief systems since the effectiveness of therapies is itself contingent on belief (‘placebo/nocebo effect’). Because beliefs change in order to accommodate choice of therapies, and because the perceived effect of therapies often influences belief, ‘markets’ for belief and healing are closely related.  But not all ‘healing’ in this market produces health.  Healing also offers ‘protection’ from other people, from other healers and from other therapies and their effects or side effects.  Since few therapies in this market produce reliable results, belief permits clients to evaluate moral states of being rather than mere evidence of efficacy as they search for healing.  Belief in the therapy allows clients to evaluate their choices and participate in healing with a greater sense of certainty.  In short, what a person believes is believed to influence how and whether he/she can be healed, and to what extent the therapy has been effective.

Britain, France and the rest. Similarly Portuguese retained it coastal in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique. While among some the African country whom resisted against colonial masters and live free are: Liberia, Ethiopia and Morocco. Though Europeans conquest of Africa continent was not achieved without heavy resistance. Most African whom were living in their tribal villages they were ignorant of the revolutionary changes that Christian missionaries brought, because they adhere to their Traditional Religious believes. Changing the pagans way of life into Europeans conceptions it was not until the vacancy of labors in the public works, mines, railways, buildings, farming and taxation methods was offered. Inevitable the recruitment affected able-bodied to the condition that people were not been able to do so. But police and soldiers enjoyed for better living the laborers. The conquerors considered Traditional custom and chiefdoms beside the colonial rules. Governments had to search for revenue from mining, farming, and companies. Above mentioned had impacted the African social life, that is why Europeans settle in the African land. Europeans set an indirectly rules which had affected the Africans lives. Education became important for the mission while economic left to the private sectors. The most important it's color prejudice, Africans often cherished the Europeans life styles and their way of life. Which affected the personality lives of the Africans and the character of the society. Thus; what we can figured out in that era it is that; there is lack of imagination, humility and compassion on the minds of Europeans. Though it was the era of medieval and dogmatism in Europe. while Africans perceived it as a science and technology era because they were wonderers of European sciences and developments. On the other hand it was brutality, barbaric, supernatural beliefs, customs and the cultural practices of the Africans Tribal which impressed Europeans to explore the continent of Africa. This is partially true that Africa is a multicultural diversificated continent, which is the real background of the Europeans exploration and colonization of Africa. Indeed Africa was blessed with natural resources, tribal handcrafts, politics, culture, philosophy and natural knowledge. but unfortunately Africans are lazy, lack of initiatives and they are lacking the sense of responsibility. Just few Africans realized the epidemic of colonial era. In fact many African communities recently resemble to the European medieval stone ages. Likewise many Africans are extremely superstitious because they lack the efficient of explaining the natural phenomena, brutal enemies of one another and victims of traditional practices, this is because they think little for the future plans, they had never embarked on the humanitarian

Abstract This paper reflects on the teaching of science fiction texts to first-year engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand as part of a Critical Thinking course that uses literature as a vehicle through which to develop competence in critical literacy and communication. This course aims to equip engineering students, as future intermediaries between science and society, with the ability to fulfil this role in both the contemporary global world and South Africa more specifically through the imaginative inhabitation of divergent subject positions afforded by literary texts. Science fiction encourages students to engage imaginatively with various societal ideas, constructs and possibilities. One of the principles of the course is that reading facilitates empathic responses, challenging readers to inhabit unfamiliar subject positions. In this way, the teaching of science fiction aims to develop self-reflective and critical learning practices, wherein engineering students grapple with the ethical ramifications of extrapolated known science in a South African context.

Despite the emphasis on materialism prompting many debates about the growth of the gold industry and the outbreak of the South African War in 1899, little research has focused on the  nancial institutions of South Africa’s early gold industry. The growth of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is woven interchangeably with that of Witwatersrand’s gold industry. This article investigates why and how the Exchange came into existence, and its early interaction with southern Africa’s gold-mining revolution. Using original documentation from the JSE and its landlord, the Johannesburg Estate Company, the article juxtaposes accounts of the London Stock Exchange, with South African  nancial developments in the last quarter of the 19th century. It describes the intentional deregulation of stock exchange listing requirements that led to the establishment of the JSE. In addition, the article outlines the JSE’s organisational developments by quantifying and qualifying trends in membership numbers up until the end of the  rst ‘Golden Boom’ of 1890. The early institutional growth of the Exchange can be seen as a balancing of organisational power between the Exchange’s landowner, Barney Barnato’s Johannesburg Estate Company, and JSE members.

International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 83, Spring 2013, pp. 137–142

This note reflects on the August 2012 miners' strike at Marikana, South Africa in light of a century long history of violence associated with worker actions in that country and elsewhere in the Global South. It suggests that the breakaway union's allegedly 'illegal' strike fits within a long tradition of radical worker activism in South Africa, which is best understood in light of anticolonial efforts to short-circuit the chronologies of imperial power. The Marikana strike, like anticolonial rebellions during the early twentieth century and, critically, white worker struggles following First World War, was an effort to speed up the process by which the value of workers' lives and labor might be made equivalent to those in power.

The rise of Julius Malema in the African National Congress (ANC)/South Africa’s politics has received different interpretations within and beyond South Africa. First, it is because of his personality as a tricky, opportunistic and firebrand young politician; and secondly because of “uncomfortable” issues he is raising about nationalization of mines and land redistribution which contravene ANC’s policy. The rise of Malema has not received a serious interrogation as many studies and discussions focus on the person of Malema and not on the issues. This article revisits the development that led to Malema’s expulsion from ANC; the emergence of the new movement – the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the possible consequences of mass (youth) education by Malema to get popular support. It argues that mobilization of the desperate population that is seeking a new path or an alternative to the Neo-liberal policies is vital and therefore political activism is awaited for to spark off the anti-neoliberalismmovement.

There is considerable debate over the causes of violence around the world, one which goes beyond the analysis of conflict to consider the dynamics of community behavior and the importance of economic and behavioral factors. South Africa competes with Colombia, Venezuela, and a number of Central American countries for the unwelcome distinction of having among the world’s highest homicide rates, and high prevalence of other forms of violence, including domestic and sexual violence, are also appallingly prevalent. This article presents an analysis of data from a panel of young men in Cape Town. It provides little support for the hypothesis that unemployment is a direct cause of violence against strangers. The impact of drinking (or taking drugs) by adults in the home or by the young men themselves, living in a bad neighborhood, and immediate poverty are associated with violence against strangers, but being unemployed is not. This suggests that few young people in South Africa in the early 2000s come from backgrounds that strongly predispose them against the use of violence.

This paper reports on an investigation into the online visibility of work undertaken in South Africa in the field of poverty alleviation. An experiment with
Google searches was undertaken, motivated by concerns about the visibility of South African research and development work, particularly in a context where social
inequality is extreme and poverty such a critical issue. Aware that much attention – through research and the practice of development work – is being paid to
poverty alleviation1
, the authors set out to examine whether that work could be found easily, and what the nature of the search results would be. Significant sums
of public money are invested in research, which should result in the production and dissemination of locally generated knowledge as a public good grounded in
local realities. A great deal of national and international funding is also spent. Thus, research published online should inform and reflect on national and regional
development practice, while contributing perspectives from the South to the global corpus of poverty research. Research to understand poverty and inform the design
and targeting of poverty alleviation programmes needs to be freely available and actively shared in order for it to accumulate value. In this regard it is argued that
there are exponentially beneficial linkages between research, scholarly publication and social development, which originate with local knowledge production and
are amplified by the availability and discoverability of that research. Availability and discoverability add breadth and depth to the potential use, value and impact
of the knowledge produced

This book is the first of a kind in that it covers South Africa's war in East and North Africa in a single volume. However, it is by no means a complete history. Some events, especially those which involve the South Africans, are dealt with in detail, while other facets of the desert war receive less attention. The Union Defence Force in the Second World War made tremendous sacrifices, all but forgotten in South Africa and Britain. Britain owes a debt to the South Africans who voluntarily came to her aid during her darkest hours. Modern day South Africans, who enjoy the fruits of a democratic country, should not forget that black and white South Africans soldiers took up arms and fought side by side against fascist tyranny in the hope that a better and freer South Africa would emerge as a result of their sacrifices.

Apartheid was a regime of socio-spatial relegation: racialised populations were banished to South Africa's urban peripheries and rural hinterlands. In the post-apartheid period, the ruling ANC framed its democratisation project as remedial , a corrective to centuries of dispossession. This entailed government providing the physical infrastructure required for black South Africans to return to cities, not as precarious squatters on the urban fringe, but as residents with an equal right to the city. Yet, more than a quarter century later, little progress has been made in any substantive sense. While South Africa has delivered more free, formal housing units than any other modern democracy, it has consistently failed to coordinate this programme with employment, transportation, and food security initiatives. This has left residents with homes to be sure, but typically delivered to locations where residents already live, rendering the geography of apartheid permanent. This chapter also accounts for the substandard quality of the units delivered; the slow pace of delivery ; and the fact that the housing backlog continues to grow despite the ongoing provision of homes. It concludes with an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the government's equation of housing delivery with democratisation tout court.

This research examines the provision of comprehensive reproductive healthcare to women with HIV in South Africa, with a focus on the highly contested issue of abortion. It explores how the emergence and escalation of the HIV epidemic, and the later implementation of the national antiretroviral treatment (ART) programme, influenced the public provision of reproductive healthcare for women with HIV. It also examines the effects of government's failure to implement health protocols and policies to provide adequate reproductive healthcare for women with HIV. This has resulted in the punitive treatment of patients by healthcare workers and in further coercive practices such as forced abortion and sterilisation. Despite the copious data generated about the medical and sociological effects of the HIV pandemic, little research has been conducted on abortion and HIV. This chapter builds on the work of public health scholars, medical historians and bioethicists to document and analyse persistent challenges in the provision of reproductive health services to HIV-positive women in South Africa.

The aim of this article is to examine the performance of the Electoral Commission (IEC) of South Africa. The analysis not only confines itself to the 2011 local government elections, but also examines how the IEC, through the use of a Voter Participation Survey (VPS) and an Election Satisfaction Survey (ESS), has been evaluated by the voters over the past local government elections. Results from these surveys show overwhelming endorsement of the Electoral Commission alongside noteworthy generally positive attitudes regarding voting intention. However, despite the positive findings, signs of a growing sense of political disillusionment are evident among South Africans. The article examines some of the reasons for the disillusionment, places it in an international context where political values are changing, and also suggests ways for the IEC to address it going forward.

Between 2009 and 2014, South Africa experienced widespread protests. In contrast to prominent examples of global protest during the same period, they were localized and did not push for broad political and economic transformation. To explain these features, this article draws from three ethnographic and interview-based case studies of local protest and organizing within informal settlements in and around Johannesburg. The author argues that urban poverty and the experience of market insecurity, on the one hand, and democratization and the experience of state betrayal, on the other hand, gave rise to specific political orientations. Residents responded to market insecurity by demanding collective consumption for place-based communities, and they responded to state betrayal by demanding fulfillment of a national liberation social contract through administrative fixes. Both strategies confined activism to the local level and limited broader challenges. The findings have implications for research on both the urban poor and social movements.

This article studies the complexity of understandings of forgiveness among a sample of Black and White South Africans within the context of an empirical intercultural Bible reading process. We will first focus on the foundation upon which the study is predicated—namely that the social imagination of forgiveness is deeply contested among South Africans. Next, we will discuss the approach that the study took to gather the necessary data, and analyse the theological views of forgiveness among the participants in the study. Finally, we shall discuss some of the primary findings of the study. These show that social identity plays a significant role in shaping theological hermeneutics. Black and White participants hold diverse, and even conflicting, expressions and expectations for forgiveness. These are characterised as predominantly social and political for the Black participants, and predominantly individual and spiritual for the White participants.

In this essay, I will look at how Constitutional supremacy in post-apartheid South Africa has led to the Constitutional Court potentially breaching the separation of powers doctrine. I will first look at how constitutional supremacy has facilitated widespread legal reform in post-apartheid South Africa. I will then focus on the Constitutional Court, how it’s extensive powers has allowed it to establish progressive legal human rights protections, but how these powers have also led to a debate of whether it has allowed them to abuse the separation of powers doctrine.

This paper examines the tensions and benefits that emerge from the nexus between social movements and ‘support organisations’, in particular those using a rights-based approach and offering legal services, working together on socio-economic rights advocacy, research and litigation in South Africa. It argues that some of the critiques cloud the real potential of such relationships, as well as their complexity. Between praxis and paralysis there is in fact a broad spectrum of highly nuanced and negotiated relationships among legal organisations and social movements.

Como bien sabemos todos el cannabis no es originario de África. Proviene de Asia. Pero la difusión de ésta en el África subsahariana se debe a las comunidades de inmigrantes musulmanes del norte y a comerciantes árabes que viajaban a través de la costa de África occidental.
Las evidencias más tempranas del cannabis en territorio africano son de Etiopía donde se descubrieron cuencos con restos de cannabis en una excavación arqueológica en la zona de Lalibela (Van der Merwe, 1975: 77-80). La planta aparece desde el norte de África hasta el sur; era cultivada a lo largo de Kafaria por la tribu de los Kafirs, cerca del Cabo de Buena Esperanza, y era llamado bangue.