apartheid - The African Mirror

Apr

2024

Good Jew, Bad Jew: new book explores why the West views brutality against Ukrainians and Palestinians differently

IN a recently published book Steven Friedman, who has written extensively on the political and social aspects of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, explores the racist underpinnings of the West’s responses to Israel’s war in Gaza. This is an extract from the book, Good Jew, Bad Jew. Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani sees a link between the violence of the coloniser and the slaughter of Jews and Slavs by the Nazis. The racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and others who claimed the Aryan race was superior meant that Jews and Slavs, who were both regarded as not Aryan, could be…

Jan

2024

By SETH ONYANGO, BIRD STORY AGENCY

South Africa transitions from apartheid victim to global advocate in Israel case

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP, EDITORS CHOICE

SOUTH Africa's unprecedented move to sue Israel for genocide at the ICJ, inspired by its own history of resistance to apartheid, is reinforcing Africa's heft in the increasingly combustible global geopolitical scene. The ICJ in The Hague will hear arguments from South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. The case, which has drawn support from several states, as well as human rights groups, is seen as a historic challenge to Israel's military actions and policies in the occupied territories. South Africa, which suffered under the brutal system of apartheid for decades, claims to have a…

Jan

2024

By The African Mirror

Peter Magubane: courageous photographer who chronicled South Africa’s struggle for freedom

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP, EDITORS CHOICE

PETER Sexford Magubane, a courageous South African photographer whose images testify to both the iniquity of apartheid and the determination and devotion of those who brought about its demise, passed away at 91 years of age in early January 2024. KYLIE THOMAS, Senior Researcher and Senior Lecturer (Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork), NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Magubane leaves behind a vast archive of extraordinary images, many of which continue to be the signature images of some of the worst atrocities committed by the apartheid regime. The photographer suffered great losses during apartheid. In 1969 Magubane…

Jan

2024

By BHARGAV ACHARYA

Peter Magubane, South African photographer who documented apartheid, dies aged 91

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

PETER Magubane, the renowned artist-photographer who shed light on the everyday struggles of Black South Africans for decades under apartheid, died on Monday. He was 91. After joining Drum magazine in 1955, Magubane gained prominence as one of the few Black photographers covering the repressive era. One of his landmark images, taken a year later in a wealthy Johannesburg suburb, showed a white girl sitting on a bench with a sign reading "Europeans Only" while a Black worker sat behind her combing her hair. In the 1960s, amid a surge in anti-apartheid activism, he covered Nelson Mandela's arrest and the…

Dec

2023

By TANNUR ANDERS

Malala Yousafzai likens Taliban’s treatment of women to apartheid in Mandela lecture

NEWS

NOBEL Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai likened restrictions the Taliban has placed on women in Afghanistan to the treatment of Black people under apartheid in a lecture in South Africa organised by Nelson Mandela's foundation. Yousafzai survived being shot in the head when she was 15 in her native Pakistan by a gunman after campaigning against the Pakistani Taliban's moves to deny girls education. Since winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, Yousafzai, now 26, has become a global symbol of the resilience of women in the face of repression. "If you are a girl in Afghanistan, the Taliban has…

Nov

2023

By The African Mirror

Sharpeville: new research on 1960 South African massacre shows the number of dead and injured was massively undercounted

SPECIAL FEATURES: ANALYSIS

ON 21 March 1960 at 1.40 in the afternoon, apartheid South Africa’s police opened fire on a peaceful crowd of about 4,000 residents of Sharpeville, who were protesting against carrying identity documents that restricted black people’s movement. The police minimised the number of victims by at least one-third and justified the shooting by claiming that the crowd was violent. This shocking story has been thus misrepresented for over 60 years. NANCY L CLARK, Dean and Professor Emeritus, Louisiana State University WILLIAM H. WORGER, Professor Emeritus of History, University of California, Los Angeles Our new research retells the story of Sharpeville,…

Nov

2023

By The African Mirror

A free messaging app seemed useful for disadvantaged South African students: why they didn’t agree

EDUCATION

SOUTH African higher education is plagued by inequalities due to the social and economic legacies of apartheid. More than 50% of enrolment in higher education is from black, working-class, disadvantaged households from rural areas who depend on state-funded student aid. At the same time, some institutions of higher learning are also historically disadvantaged: they were designated for non-white students during the apartheid era. These institutions suffered discrimination, underfunding and limited resources, creating disparities in the country’s higher education system. FAZLYN PETERSEN, Information Systems Senior Lecturer, University of the Western Cape In a rapidly evolving digital era, one of the big…

Jul

2023

By The African Mirror

Tennis and apartheid: how a South African teenager was denied his dream of playing at Wimbledon

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

TODAY the All England Lawn Tennis Club, hosts of the famous Wimbledon Championships, pledges to be diverse and inclusive. But in 1971 an 18-year-old university student, Hoosen Bobat from Durban, was excluded from achieving his dream of becoming the first black South African to play in the Wimbledon men’s junior tournament. This was due to apartheid, and the collusion of the all-white tennis union in South Africa and the International Lawn Tennis Federation, with Wimbledon toeing the line. SALEEM BADAT, Research Professor, UFS History Department, University of the Free State I tell Bobat’s story in the new book Tennis, Apartheid…

Jan

2023

By The African Mirror

Ernest Cole: South Africa’s most famous photobook has been republished after 55 years

LITERATURE

PHOTOGRAPHER Ernest Cole was born in 1940 in the Pretoria township of Eersterust, just before apartheid was formally introduced in South Africa in 1948. Author KYLIE THOMAS, Senior Researcher, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies He was 20 when thousands of people gathered outside a police station in Sharpeville township to protest against being forced to carry passbooks by the white minority government. On that day at least 69 people were shot dead, hundreds were injured, and a state of emergency was declared. The Sharpeville Massacre is regarded as a turning point in the struggle for liberation in…

Dec

2022

By The African Mirror

Koos Prinsloo: the cult Afrikaans writer has been translated to English – here’s a review

LITERATURE

THERE are some writers you wish you had encountered years ago. There are some authors you only discover – for many reasons – years after their death. The Afrikaans writer Koos Prinsloo is one such, for me. He wrote during the last violent decade of apartheid – a system of forced racial segregation implemented by the Afrikaans-speaking white minority rulers of South Africa. While the country was undergoing states of emergency and increasing internal revolt, Prinsloo wrote from deep within the dominant white patriarchal culture. But his work spoke directly back to this domination by representing a maligned and repressed…