Home
Featured Story
“Boxing saved my life”: Interview with the owner of the African Youth Boxing Club
“Boxing saved my life… without boxing I would be dead”. Thembani Gqeku was telling me about his childhood and his experiences as a young professional boxer. Gqeku started boxing in East London in 1978, when he was nine years old. He had fought 18 professional fights, with five losses and a draw.
News
The Khoi blues: Interview with Colin Meyer
Review: “I am not a Coloured, I am Khoi,” says Colin Meyer. “The apartheid era imposed the identity of being Coloured on us, but that is an invention.”
Teaching kids in Khayelitsha how to fence - for sport
News: A few years back you wouldn’t be seen as an ignorant person in Khayelitsha if you didn’t know what fencing is. But that is slowly changing, with the introduction of this unusual sport in the township.
Alleged discrimination against foreign children in the Techno Girl programme
News: A Zimbabwean woman, Sandra Chinyanga, is unhappy because her daughter was dropped from the Techno Girl Programme after three years of consistent participation. Now she has been told that her daughter should never have been allowed to join the programme, because she is an immigrant.
Categories of Persons: Rethinking Ourselves and Others
Book extract: This slim volume, containing nine essays, is at once ambitious and humble. In their introduction, editors Megan Jones and Jacob Dlamini explain that they tried to capture a variety of deeply personal lived experiences.
Jam That Session gives a boost for Cape musicians
Review: Jam That Session is an initiative that boosts the arts in Cape Town and provides an unconventional environment for musicians to connect with their fans and fellow artists.
Sex workers demand recognition and march to Parliament
News: Sex workers and sex worker advocates in Durban, Polokwane, Cape Town and Johannesburg took to the streets on Monday to honour International Sex Worker Rights’ Day. Similar marches were held in cities and towns all over the world. The protesters were calling attention to the human rights abuses suffered by sex workers and demanded legal recognition of sex work as a form of employment.
Ugandans in South Africa unhappy with anti-gay law
News: Uganda’s brutal new anti-gay law puts Dembe Ainebyona (not her real name) in a difficult situation because she may never see her country of birth again.
Inside the mind of a seasoned donkey smuggler: How an alternative medicine dealer plans to evade new regulations
Science: Last year the health department gazetted changes to the Medicines Act which, over about five years, will require complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) to be registered with the Medicines Control Council (MCC).
A tale of three policies
Opinion: The ANC is increasingly accused of breaking the promises it has made to the South African public. What is less widely discussed is how their promises contradict one another.
The Khayelitsha Commission takes a break
News: On Friday 21 February, the first round of public sittings of the Khayelitsha Commission came to an end. There will be no public sittings until 17 March, when senior SAPS officers will continue to give testimony.
Who are the real illegal miners?
Opinion: The rescue and subsequent arrest of zama-zama — (those prepared to) “have a go” — miners from an abandoned mine shaft near the East Rand city of Benoni made world headlines.
Voting every five years is not enough - direct democracy is possible
Editorial: Capitalism is not dead. But it is severely ill and its chronic contagion is spreading through the economic and social fibres of the world.
Uganda’s apartheid-style atrocity deserves sanctions
Opinion: The leaders who spoke of an African renaissance and who brought about the African Union ignored gay rights. We are seeing the consequences of their omission today.
Where is Reason?
Review: After dropping Audio 3D in June 2012, ‘boom bap’ rapper Sizwe ‘Reason’ Moeketsi simply disappeared from the game.
Manenberg community taking back their streets
News: Manenberg is a township in the Cape Flats outside Gugulethu. The apartheid government originally created it to relocate Coloured families who had been forcibly removed from their homes. Today it often makes the news because of gang violence.
Province tries to run illegal trial with quack medicine
Science: The Eastern Cape Health Department has instructed hospitals to give an untested medicine to patients with tuberculosis. It has not received ethical approval to proceed with this clinical trial. Now it appears the project has been scrapped, apparently after the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) asked the national government to intervene.