South Africa

By Dina Jadallah-Taschler | Palestine Chronicle | February 28, 2009

“The white is hit harder by apartheid than we are. It narrows his life. In not regarding us as human, he becomes less than human. I do pity him,” said African National Congress president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Albert Luthuli when Studs Terkel met with him in South Africa in 1963. It was almost twenty years before Studs published his book, Race: How Blacks & Whites Think & Feel About the American Obsession, but Terkels’ meetings with South Africans had a tone that was similar to his 1992 book.

Press TV – January 23, 2014

Thousands of platinum miners in South Africa have embarked on a strike demanding their entry-level pay be doubled to nearly 1,200 dollars a month.
Workers at Impala Platinum, Anglo American Platinum, and Lonmin mines embarked on an indefinite strike on Thursday, crippling output at the world’s three biggest platinum producers.

When the demise of Nelson Mandela was proclaimed to the nation by South African president Jacob Zuma the streets were hushed, and in restaurants, bars and nightclubs, there was pin drop silence as people listened in utter despondency.
ANC described him as a large baobab tree that had fallen, whose roots would nourish the soil forever.

MEMO | June 5, 2013

Human rights groups, trade unions and several other major civil society organisations have called for the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme to exclude Israel. The international diamond regulatory body is meeting in South Africa and is chaired currently by Pretoria’s former ambassador to Washington, Mr Welile Nhlapo.

What the world needs now, are “Mad Dogs”. Revolutionaries with a vision who dare to be unconventional and dare to be so all the way. It is time for us to become a Gaddafi rather than a Mandela. It is time to let the walls of fear around our thinking fall away.

Now that he is safely dead let us praise him,
build monuments to his glory,
sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make such convenient heroes.
They cannot rise to challenge the images
we would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.,
– Carl Wendell Hines

Maybe the empire thought that we would not honor our word when, during days of uncertainty in the past century, we affirmed that even if the USSR were to disappear Cuba would continue struggling. World War II broke out on September 1, 1939 when Nazi-fascist troops invaded Poland and struck like a lightning over the heroic people of the USSR, who contributed 27 million lives to preserve mankind from that brutal massacre that ended the lives of 50 million persons.

In “The Mandela Barbie,” BBC journalist and investigative reporter Greg Palast’s eulogy of Nelson Mandela provides a rare breath of sanity in the media stampede to remake a legendary Marxist revolutionary into an icon of free market capitalism. According to Palast, “The ruling class creates commemorative dolls and statues of revolutionary leaders as a way to tell us their cause is won, so go home.”

Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.
– Nelson Mandela