Just a few stories from South Africa, with brief commentary as appropriate:
Public sector employees in South Africa went on strike last week. They were asking for a wage hike and increased housing allowances. Expect heightened labor activity across South Africa in the weeks and months to come. South Africa was able to avert potentially ugly strikes from Eskom employees during the World Cup but there are underlying tensions between labor, government, and employers that have shown no sign of dissipating.
Awwww . . . go look at Shwe Shwe Poppis adorable little dolls based on drawings from the children at the African Children’s Feeding Scheme’s Malnutrition and Rehabilitation Creche in Zola, Soweto. These kids are channeling their inner Pablo Picasso.
Lebogang Maile has been elected the ANC Youth League’s (ANCYL) new leader in Gauteng, which is widely seen as a blow to ANCYL national president and lightning rod for controversy Julius Malema. This is another story that will continue to roil for the foreseeable future.
The controversy over the proposed media tribunal also continues to stew. This is yet another story that is not going away soon and it has huge implications for South Africa’s democracy, for good or ill, no matter how it turns out. A fully free media is a full stop essential in any democracy. The government insists that any tribunal (or other actions) will not encroach upon media freedom, but the media and other critics are right to be vigilant and to fight any perceived government intervention in the independent media.
Kennedy Odede’s recent New York Times op ed on “slum tourism” is not explicitly about South Africa, but it could be. A Soweto tour tends to rank high on most tourist itineraries, something with which I have always been uncomfortable given the implications. I like the infusion of money into the townships, to be sure, but I wish the process were more organic and that instead we could blur the lines and bash down the walls between “townships” and “city,” and part of tearing down these walls is the intellectual process of diminishing the townships merely as the place of a benighted other.
