#south african apartheid

[mirkobloom77]

[seohyun0306]

Not surprised that mossad and Israel are once again terrorising an African woman. They’re probably distraught that she’s too old to be given non consensual birth control injections. It’s an undisputed fact that Israel sees African people and countries as hut-dwelling, backroads sub- human terrorist cockroaches but we dragged their Zionist asses to the icj and won and we’ll do much fucking worse if those white demons try that shit with us. Threatening one of us is threatening all of us and making an enemy of one of us is making an enemy of all of us. We refuse to be bullied and intimidated by people who supplied weapons for the Rwandan genocide and who wanted to provide the apartheid government with nuclear fucking weapons. South Africa and Africa as a whole have been victims to white supremacy and colonialism for too long to let any people who get skin cancer at the slightest exposure to sunlight victimise us.

[teachanarchy]

How did Apartheid happen, and how did it finally end? - Thula Simpson

[documenting-apartheid]

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Jodi Allemeier: "In a bookshop earlier today I picked up a 1955 book "Solution for South Africa - a Jewish View". It calls for solidarity between Zionism and Afrikaaner independence for a Cape Colony. I didn't buy it. But the communication was clear and quite an interesting piece of Zionist & Apartheid communication."

[makingcontact]

Disclose! Divest!: Behind the Fight Over College Endowments

A child running through the Stanford Divestment Encampment. Credit: RJ Lozado. As graduation approached this year, students around the country began protests after calls for divestment from Israel were initially ignored by university leadership. The campus encampments were met with physical violence and the mainstream press dismissed the students’ demands as naive and immature. But, it turns out…

[readingsquotes]

"From ‘Mandela Hall’ to ‘Hind’s Hall’

At the invitations of university administrators nationwide, police clad in riot gear have, over the last few weeks, swarmed campuses, arresting thousands of protesters peacefully calling for the very thing students were demanding more than two decades ago.

At Columbia, president Minouche Shafik invited the notoriously brutal NYPD in against the very student body she is charged with protecting and appearing to give them carte blanche to carry out the largest on-campus mass arrests since 1968. Some of the most distressing images came out of Hamilton Hall, a Columbia building that students occupied demanding divestment from Israel, financial transparency over the university’s $14 billion endowment, and amnesty for all the student participants. Instead of entering a serious and genuine dialogue over those demands, including divestment, the university allowed police to arrest and assault protesters. According to Students for Justice in Palestine, police pushed one student down the stairs, rendering them unconscious, after which point they were denied medical care. 

Despite this disproportionate violence, Columbia students are carrying on a proud legacy. In the last seven months of Israel’s relentless assault and nightmarish genocide, it was footage of Columbia students unfurling a banner renaming Hamilton “Hind’s Hall” after the six-year-old martyr Hind Rajab that gave me an electrical feeling I had almost forgotten: hope. Hind sat in a car with her murdered family, her small voice trembling on a phone line to the Palestinian Red Crescent as she begged to be rescued from Israeli fire only to be killed by them too. “We cannot act for our Palestinian comrades,” the Columbia student communique read, “but we see them; we are with them.” It was signed on behalf of The People’s University for a Liberated Palestine and released on the 206th day of Israel’s genocide.

It was their forebearers who,less than four decades earlier, occupied the same Hamilton Hall for about three weeks, chaining and padlocking its doors shut and renaming it “Mandela Hall” – in order to force divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. It was their agitation that made Columbia University, in 1985, the first Ivy League school to announce it would sever all financial links with the apartheid regime, committing to divest 4% of its portfolio.

...

Americans keep wondering what has ‘got into’ the students,” the writer James Baldwin wrote during the civil rights movement and the era of Vietnam war protests, “what has ‘got into’ them is their history in this country.”

[gnlives]

30 years of demonstrating dispensation in South Africa. 🇿🇦

[historydailyfrancischappellblack]

Nelson Mandela, the leader of the campaign to end South African apartheid, is released from prison by South African President F.W. De Klerk after 27 years behind bars. February 11, 1990. Image: Nelson Mandela walks to freedom. February 11, 1990. On this day in history, Nelson Mandela, the leader of the campaign to end South African apartheid, is released from prison by South African President…

[filosofablogger]

Stephen Biko -- A Reblog by rawgod

Every now and then a person comes to this earth who makes a real difference in the lives of not just a few, but of many, sometimes an entire nation.  Think of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Marie Curie and others.  One such man was Stephen Biko, a civil rights activist who literally helped change the face of South Africa.  Our friend rawgod has written a post to coincide with…

[heritageposts]

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons. The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret. The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

. . . continues at the guardian (24th of may, 2010)

here's also a research paper published in 2004, which, looking at declassified south african documents, lays out apartheid south africa's rational for acquiring nuclear weapons (bombing, or 'deterring,' black liberation groups):

[mirkobloom77]

‼️🇵🇸🎓 ‘Change starts on college campuses’: From South African apartheid to Vietnam War: On campus encampments supporting Gaza

🔸 Source: Al Jazeera, with Urooba Jamal

⬇️ A video on a very similar topic

⬇️ A list of the universities that have joined the movement so far (as of 24th of April, 10:46 in GMT-6 time)

[seohyun0306]

My father was born on June 16th 1976 in apartheid South Africa, the exact day of the Soweto uprising where around 170-700 school students were estimated to have been shot dead at a peaceful protest. My father’s family were welcoming a new baby into their family while a few hours away, hundreds of parents’ babies were shot dead. To my father’s family and my family, June 16th is not a day to be celebrated for his birth but a day of mourning whose impact has never decreased in all the 48 years since the massacre happened.

How many thousands of parents in Palestine, be it Gaza or the West Bank, have to grieve constantly for their babies getting massacred, imprisoned, tortured, shot and raped even on the days where they should be celebrating their births? Nearly everyday my asks are bombarded with anon hate and blatant disrespect, ignorance and misinformation about my country’s history, which I no longer bother to even entertain. Disrespecting and ignoring what is happening in Palestine is not only disrespectful to their thousands of brutal deaths at the hands of the iof, but also disrespectful towards every single South African death at the hands of the apartheid government.

There are no two countries as intrinsically connected like South Africa and Palestine and no two entities as disgustingly similar as the Israeli government and the South African apartheid government. On paper, South Africa has been free for 30 years, but in reality we will never be completely free until Palestine is too and Israel is crushed and banished into obscurity like our previous regime was.

[teachanarchy]

How did Apartheid happen, and how did it finally end? - Thula Simpson

[ablackwomansurvivingrape]

SA is a nation at war with women and children

The reported crimes committed in the first quarter of the year indicate a sharp increase in the number of women and children who were raped and murdered. In the first three months of this year, 10 818 people were raped in South Africa.

Almost half of the cases took place at the home of the victim or the home of the rapist. Of the 6 083 people killed in the country, 898 of them were women, and 306 were children under the age of 17. Alarmingly, the murder of children recorded a 37.2% increase in the period of reporting.

Therefore, the declaration of gender-based violence as the second pandemic was accurate. However, unlike Covid-19, we seem to be losing the battle against this pandemic. With all the progressive legislation in South Africa, which seeks to eliminate unequal power relations between men and women, one question we must ask is why are women becoming increasingly unsafe in this country? Where does this culture emanate from, and more importantly, how do we bring it to an end?

To borrow from the words of Karl Marx – history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. It is, therefore, important to get a brief historical account of the violent masculinities engraved in the DNA of South Africa, which manifests itself through social ills such as gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) today.

Defining GBV, the Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Act states that GBV denotes “all acts perpetrated against women, girls, men and boys based on their gender, sex or sexual orientation which cause or could cause them physical, sexual, psychological, emotional or economic harm, and includes any threat to cause harm”.

At the minimum, we agree with this definition, although in the context of South Africa, GBV is almost always perpetrated by men on women because of the unequal power relations between the two, as depicted by the staggering crime statistics.

Tracing the crisis South Africa is a very violent country. There was a perpetual normalisation of violence under apartheid, and post-apartheid South Africa has not been able to cleanse itself from this culture of violence.

As it were, this culture of violence saw white Afrikaner men embody hegemonic masculinities – something Bell Hooks defines as “White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy”. To date, this behaviour continues, and it is not only prevalent among white Afrikaner men – it is a South African problem.

The tightening racial edifice of the apartheid state evolved into a political and social struggle that became increasingly defined by violent opposition. Masculinities were constructed alongside and amid these realities, creating what Penelope Andrews terms “(t)he lethal cocktail of apartheid masculinities.

Apartheid has left a legacy of violent masculinities. Apartheid emasculated black men. They were called boys, denied respect, and treated as subordinates.” The struggle of apartheid was both the struggle for freedom and, for men, it was a struggle to regain their masculinities. Men were forced to migrate for employment and work in mines. As men were forced to migrate to the mines for work, wage labour became critical, and was a crucial defining characteristic of masculinity as men increasingly became the sole provider for their families back in the reserves.

Today, as traditional expectations underpinned by this history are entrenched, the questions of strength and the extent to which one can provide for one’s family are key among men.

In the absence of these apparent manhood symbols, men seek alternative dominance through violent means. Black women, especially young black women in post-apartheid South Africa, remain the most vulnerable economically and socially, with 40.6% without jobs in the first quarter of the year. This is a crisis.

The question of what is to be done with these misplaced masculinities in post-apartheid South Africa remains and needs thorough thinking, especially among young people across party political lines, as we are the most destitute and most affected by the increasing levels of unsafety in our communities. Is there any hope for women and children in South Africa?

Our criminal justice system is failing women and children in this country. The crime statistics reported on are but a fraction of the actual levels of crime that take place on a daily basis. It is estimated that over 40% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime and that only 1 in 9 rapes are reported.

The reluctance in reporting GBV is precisely because of the low levels of conviction and the masculine nature of the police conduct, which further traumatises victims. Therefore, the first component of ending this war on the bodies of women and children is addressing the institutional challenges in our law enforcement agencies tasked to keep us safe.

We need a police service that is seen as the centre of communities instead of a police that is highly militarised, victim-blaming, perpetrator-protecting, and mostly lacks accountability. The question of what it means to serve has to be central in this regard.

At a societal level, we must admit that we will never overcome GBVF with the dominance of patriarchy, which in the South African context, is rooted in apartheid racial and class divisions.

Therefore, the mainstreaming of gender studies in all our schools from early childhood development stages is paramount. Young boys and girls must be conscientised from their earliest socialisation. We must, as society, revitalise and promote a culture of dialogue. Our legal frameworks must be supported by social action.

Government must invest in key points of intervention that will encourage behavioural change. The creation of platforms where the type of behaviour expected from men in post-apartheid South Africa is discussed is one of the questions that government should be seized with.

Lastly, and more importantly, because the South African patriarchal system is racial and capitalist in its nature, the radical socio-economic empowerment of women is now more urgent than before. This must be the foremost priority of all progressives for a future South Africa that is safe and non-sexist.

* Mhlauli writes in her personal capacity.

* * Mhlauli is the National Convener of the ANCYL and Spokesperson for the Ministry in the Presidency

[53v3nfrn5]

National Geographic: ‘Mandela’s Children’ (2010)

South Africa is a vibrant, multiethnic democracy striving, with mixed success, to fulfill its promise. Photojournalist James Nachtwey offers a vision of contemporary life.