frontlines - The African Mirror

Jun

17

2024

Students on the frontline: South Africa and the US share a history of protest against white supremacy

SPECIAL FEATURES: ANALYSIS, EDITORS CHOICE

EVERY year on 16 June, South Africa commemorates the revolt of black school children against the inferior “bantu education” system on that day in 1976. The horror of police shooting and killing unarmed children caused a global uproar. Historian Rico Devara Chapman’s research interests include a focus on the African diaspora’s historical and contemporary struggles for justice, particularly student activism in the United States and South Africa. We asked him about similarities between student revolts under the systems of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow in the United States. You draw parallels between Jim Crow and apartheid. Please explain.…

Russia jobs scam traps Indians on Ukraine war frontlines

WORLD

WHEN Raja Begum heard an Indian had died in Ukraine, she collapsed to the ground, convinced it was her missing son - one of dozens of young men lured to Russia on the promise of jobs, then sent to fight in the Ukraine war. "I can't stop thinking about the last message my son sent," said Begum, 60, who has not heard from the 31-year-old tech graduate since January - just weeks after he left the family's village in Indian-administered Kashmir to head to Moscow. Indian federal investigators say a major human trafficking network duped at least 35 men, who…

How life in Ukraine has been shattered by two years of war

WORLD

WIFES have become widows, parents long for captured sons, classrooms are empty and farmers can't find the hands to work the land. Unlikely friendships have formed; old ones have fallen apart. Even in the village of Lozuvatka, about 100 km (60 miles) from the frontlines, signs are everywhere of a two-year-old war that has irrevocably changed the face of Ukraine. Alona Onyshchuk and her five-year-old daughter Anhelina visited Lozuvatka's graveyard on a snowswept winter's day. Husband and father Serhii Aloshkin lies there alongside 10 other soldiers in a new section called Heroes' Alley. "We did not expect that there would…