THOUGHT LEADERSHIP - The African Mirror

Jul

11

2026

Racial stereotypes of African footballers persist. A World Cup is a good time to talk about them

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

WITH a Somali referee being denied entry into the US, and the surge of online racist abuse after 2026 World Cup matches, racism and exclusion in football are once again in the news. Overt anti-Black racism in football is well-reported and researched. Less visible but important structural issues remain little scrutinised, though. The 2026 World Cup is a perfect moment to examine the deeply entrenched – but often hidden – logic of the global market of footballers that reproduces racist stereotypes about Black athletes. Assumptions about the natural characteristics of African athletes persist in football transfers. Africans are often regarded…

Jul

10

2026

By MATTHEW BENSON-STROHMAYER

South Sudan at 15: how the political elite have found a way to profit from peace as well as war

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

SOUTH Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011 was meant to close the chapter on one of Africa’s longest civil wars: the north-south war that preceded it. Formally, it did. But independence did not end the deeper struggles over power, revenue and coercion inside the newly independent state. South Sudan returned to war in 2013, watched a 2015 settlement collapse, and now lives under a 2018 Revitalised Agreement whose promised transition has been postponed repeatedly. This is usually told as a story of failed peacemaking, with too many spoilers and too little political will. But what if these deals are not…

Jul

09

2026

By LAUREN SEIBERT

African states shouldn’t help the US endanger refugees

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

DISEMBARKING at an airport in Cameroon a few weeks ago, two Cameroonian women shook with fear. They had fled their country over a year before to seek asylum in the United States, but were summarily deported from the US to Equatorial Guinea, whose authorities sent them back to Cameroon. Both women had been previously granted ‘withholding of removal’ by US immigration judges based on the likelihood they would be persecuted in Cameroon. ‘We were very scared,’ one of the women told me. ‘The day before we left Equatorial Guinea, a commissioner told us we were leaving for Cameroon … We…

Jul

07

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

Infantino’s red card: how FIFA’s president is destroying the game he was elected to save

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

GIANNI Infantino has done something that no FIFA president has managed before, and it is not an achievement. He has taken the one institutional virtue football's governing body always claimed for itself - independence from political interference - and handed it, gift-wrapped, to a foreign head of state. FIFA has always thundered about keeping governments out of football. It has suspended national federations for exactly this offence. And now its own president has let a government reach into a World Cup and rewrite a refereeing outcome. Let us be precise about what happened, because the facts are damning enough without…

Jul

06

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

The Gallery of Rogues

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

IT has become a grim, almost daily ritual: a senior police officer, a metro official or a well-connected businessman is named, suspended, arrested or fired, and South Africa's roll call of the disgraced grows a little longer. Nine months into its work, the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference, and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System — chaired by retired Constitutional Court Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga and popularly known simply as the Madlanga Commission - has done what countless commissions before it failed to do: it has produced consequences while it is still sitting. What began in July 2025…

Jul

06

2026

By SIM TSHABALALA

Truth in the age of AI: The fight for sustainable journalism

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

SINCE I am talking to a gathering of South Africa’s best journalists, I assume that you’re not going to take that assertion at face value. It is perfectly reasonable to ask why an entity like Standard Bank should have an interest in supporting and celebrating high-quality journalism. I have four answers. The first answer is the most obvious – and there’s no point in denying it. Banks are powerful. Banks sometimes make mistakes. Banks are often on the front line in the fight against fraud and other forms of crime. And, perhaps most importantly, banks are the only kind of…

Jul

03

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

Ramaphosa’s fatal miscalculation: Why Dina Pule is the wrong answer to a country exhausted by scandal

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

THERE are political mistakes, and then there are mistakes that tell a nation exactly how little its leadership has learned. President Cyril Ramaphosa's decision to appoint Dina Pule as Minister of Social Development belongs unmistakably to the second category. It is not merely an unforced error. It is a self-inflicted wound, delivered at the worst possible moment, to a presidency and a governing party that can no longer survive the political bleeding. Let us be precise about what just happened, because precision is the first casualty when the ANC tries to manage a story like this one. Sisisi Tolashe was…

Jul

03

2026

By FELIX-ANTOINE TSHISEKEDI TSHILOMBO

“Let us rise with confidence, courage, and love for the DR – United in truth. Firm in sovereignty. Responsible in action.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

SIXTY-SIX years have passed since that historic day when the Congolese people, after long years of colonial domination, rose up in their dignity to assert before the world their inalienable right to freedom, self-determination, and mastery of their own destiny. 30 June is therefore not a simple date on our republican calendar. It is at once a memory, a promise, and a responsibility. It is the memory of those who, through their courage and sacrifice, opened the path to our freedom. For them, the unity, dignity, and sovereignty of the Congolese people mattered more than their own lives. It is…

Jul

01

2026

By JOVIAL RANTAO

The matriarch who would not be silenced: Miria Matembe’s long war against power

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

There is a particular kind of courage that belongs almost exclusively to those who have nothing left to prove and nothing left to lose. At 72, Dr Miria Rukoza Koburunga Matembe has spent more than three decades demonstrating exactly that kind of courage, and this week it appears to have cost her her freedom. Matembe disappeared after security operatives raided her Luzira home while she was out on her regular morning walk. Days of uncertainty followed, marked by an emotional televised appeal from a former member of parliament, statements of concern from women's rights organisations and opposition leaders, and a…

Jun

30

2026

By THABO MBEKI

South Africa’s political and economic crisis: in search of a visible enemy, ghosts and African immigrants

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

THE issue of migration in South Africa seems to have generated more heat than light. This has occupied public discourse at home and abroad. As a Foundation committed to catalyzing the Renaissance of Africa, we cannot avoid adding our voice to this matter, which threatens to undermine all efforts of building African unity. The images of anti-African-immigrant marches in our country reflect images of despair rather than hope in the future of our continent and mothers with crying babies at their backs in cold winter nights and mornings are an affront to our collective humanity. We are deeply concerned about…