There has recently been a revealing polemical exchange between Joel Netshitenzhe, the former chief ideologist of the National Democratic Revolution, and the SACP’s chief ideologist, Jeremy Cronin.
In a critique of the SACP’s 2014 “Going to the Root” discussion document, Netshitenzhe endorsed the need for the radical implementation of the second phase of the NDR. However, he made the following points:
In an article in Tuesday’s Media24 publications Max du Preez states that Dylann Roof, accused of killing nine black worshippers in Charleston, S. Carolina, “shares apartheid’s ideology.” Du Preez goes on to say that Barend Strydom’s random killing of seven black South Africans in 1989 made him think “that his (Roof’s) identification with apartheid wasn’t so inappropriate after all.”
This inescapably creates the impression that the wanton killing of black people was somehow an integral aspect of the ideology of apartheid.
Language of instruction is a key issue at the heart of debate in most multilingual countries.
On 1 May, South Africa will once again celebrate Workers’ Day – although, in truth, there is nothing to celebrate.
Race relations in South Africa are more fractious now than they have been at any time since 1994.
Current developments on the campuses of NWU, Stellenbosch and UCT are raising core questions, not only about the future of our universities, but also about the nature of our multicultural society.
At the ANC’s glittering Gala Dinner in Cape Town last Friday President Zuma said that Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival in the Cape was the beginning of all South Africa’s problems.
People who are sceptical about big government sometimes observe that society can afford lazy and ineffective public servants because, on the whole, they do little harm – apart from consuming taxpayers’ money.
Jonathan Jansen is one of our most outspoken and influential academic leaders. From time to time he has taken sensible and courageous decisions in navigating the minefield of transformational politics at his own university, the University of the Free State.
