Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
What does it require to get management to take a sexual harassment complaint seriously? If the recent National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (Numsa) strike is anything to go by, it takes about 290 striking workers remaining underground without food and clean water for nine days.
From (...)
President Cyril Ramaphosa vowed more funding to the country’s one-stop centres for victims of abuse. But can provinces afford to make good on the president’s promise?
More than half of the country’s Thuthuzela Care Centres (TCCs) are without counselling services or have been forced to rely on (...)
South Africa legalised abortion in 1997. Yet so few clinics offer them that women still risk their lives by turning to illegal means
I have been an abortion provider for as long as I have been a qualified doctor. In the past five years, I have been inundated with emails, social media requests and calls from women from all walks of life desperate for my help.
I will never forget one young woman who came to the public clinic in the West Rand township near Johannesburg, panicking about (...)
Sexual violence should not be tolerated even in a revolutionary movement. Feminists in the movement have to speak out.
The white media is obsessed with every movement that the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) makes. They have to be. Julius Malema’s proximity to white supremacists like Lord (...)
Marienna Pope-Weidemann meets Sikhala Sonke, a grassroots social justice group led by the women of Marikana.
The women of Sikhala Sonke. Photo: Sikhala Sonke
The fatal police shooting of 37 striking workers at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in August 2012 was the worst recorded instance (...)
In April 2017 we saw the launch of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu). At inception, it became the second largest federation in South Africa, with 24 affiliates and about 700 000 members. Some people have seen the emergence of this new federation as signaling a new dawn for (...)
When we think of Marikana we think of the infamous event that took place on 16 August 2012, leading to the death of 34 striking miners. Scholarly analysis takes this further than the event to broader labour–capital relations. While useful, the examination of Marikana through this lens tends to (...)
Seventeen years ago, as apartheid came to an end and a democratically elected government took power, South Africa seemed ready to become an abortion rights pioneer. In 1996, the post-apartheid legislature passed the first law in sub-Saharan Africa legalizing abortion without restriction in the (...)
The recent closure for public submissions on the Traditional Courts Bill has caused great concern as the Bill could strip millions of rural South Africans – especially women – of their basic rights. It substantially increases the power of traditional leaders to the expense of people’s basic (...)
Small-scale farmers had little hope that leaders negotiating on their behalf would change their plight.
Dressed in her white T-shirt and wide-rimmed hat, Dominica Shumba didn’t expect her first visit to Durban to be so hot and humid, amidst thundering clouds. The Zimbabwean travelled more than (...)
Much has been said in the media and private conversations on the latest revelations of the South African president’s paternity of a child “out of wedlock” and polygamy.
Myth 1: It is a private matter.
Jacob Zuma is not a private citizen, he is the President of this country and his sex and love (...)
Some five years ago, the overwhelming majority of both rural and urban South Africans would have baulked at the idea of polygamy. However, it seems that polygamy has regained some legitimacy and currency. Together with President Zuma, celebrities such as the composer and playwright Mbongeni (...)
The family is pivotal to the maintenance of the neo-liberal order, an order marked by an intense individualism and a privatisation of social relations. Among working-class households there is a retreat into the private sphere of the family/household which involves an atomised struggle for daily (...)
The court was silent. It was as if everyone was holding their breath, afraid to miss a single word as Judge Mailula delivered his verdict. The fate of Buyisiwe, the seven accused, and to some extent all of the activists who had been involved in this case since 2006, rested on the carefully (...)
Recent years have witnessed increasing incidents of women politicians compromising their accountability to the women of South Africa, and to democratic and transformative processes in general. Alarmingly, many of these politicians have been key figures in past struggles for social justice, (...)
The most life-shatt ering decision I ever made was to leave home and go blindly into exile. I say blindly because it was without forethought. From an early age, I knew that the South Africa of the time was not the place to build my life and dreams.
My first child was born on 6 February 1956. I (...)
In South Africa, rural women’s economic position or disposition is closely linked to their relationship with land. Most rural women do not own land, an effect of a dominant patriarchal culture that favours men as landowners, as well as that of apartheid, where the majority of rural people (...)
Interview with WLUML networker Rashida Manjoo about her experiences of the Gender Equality Commission of South Africa, conducted during the recent conference in Malaysia on ’Mechanisms and Legislation to Promote and Protect Gender Equality’. (the Sun - Malaysia)
When South Africa became a new (...)
The HIV/AIDS crisis in southern and South Africa has spread enormously wide and has caused a lot of social problems and individual suffering on a general level. Among all people living with HIV/AIDS, there are some groups who are especially affected by it; two of them are women and youth.
In (...)
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