South Africa

Download PDF Tube workers' battle An open letter to Clare Short (Annie O'Keefe) Bosnia: will the ceasefire hold? (Martin Thomas) Israel: the myth of Rabin and the prospect for peace (Adam Keller) South Africa: victors don't commit war crimes (Anne Mack) After Yeltsin, what?

On South African Struggles (1995) Download PDF

Of 2000 odd multinationals in South Africa, 1200 are British. Download PDF

In January this year around 70,000 members of the South African Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) downed tools at mines run by the world's top three platinum producers — Anglo American Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin — to demand that their basic wages be more than doubled to 12,500 rand a month. A recent attempt to return to work ended in four deaths as conflict broke out at Lomin offices in Marikana, the latest in a string of violent incidents surrounding the dispute. To say (as some commentators have) that their strike has reached a critical point is misleading to...

Mzwamdile Tshofela is a chair of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) branch at the Mercedes Benz plant in East London, Eastern Cape province. He is also a member of the global Works Council [employee-employer consultation body] for Mercedes Benz’s parent company Daimler. He spoke to Solidarity on 23-25 May during the Labour Start conference in Berlin. S: We have heard about NUMSA calling on the Confederation of South African Unions (COSATU) to break with the ANC governing party, can you tell us a little bit about that? MT: This is a hot debate within South African...

Since the election of the Government of National Unity in South Africa last year there has been a heightened level of class struggle. Workers are fighting for an economic change to match the new political situation

Rumour has it that in 1994 some leading trade union organisers in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) gave the African National Congress (ANC) a ten year deadline to introduce serious social democratic reforms. Ten years passed a decade ago, but now it seems the deadline may have passed politically as well. One of the largest and best organised unions in South Africa, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) has dissociated itself from the ANC-South African Communist Party (SACP)-COSATU alliance. In December 2013 at a special national congress (attended by 1...

If you grew up in radical politics in the 1980s, anti-apartheid activism was ubiquitous — a reference point, an inspiration, and an accessible vehicle for campaigning. Demonstrating outside the South African embassy, attending cultural and political meetings and demanding freedom for Nelson Mandela were rites of passage across the spectrum of the left. The lessons of the anti-apartheid movement retain their contemporary relevance. Some within climate and anti-war campaigns have looked to it as a model. More widely, the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign has explicitly...

After Nelson Mandela died on 5 December, Tory prime minister David Cameron was full of praise for Mandela. Full of hypocrisy, too. In 1989, when Mandela was still in jail under the apartheid regime, Cameron went on an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa, organised and funded by Strategy Network Internation (SNI), a group created in 1985 specifically to lobby against the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid government. Asked about the trip by the authors of a book on Cameron about the trip, Alistair Cooke, who was Cameron's boss when he worked in 1989 at Tory Central Office, was "simply...

Nelson Mandela was a big man and his long life was punctuated by huge personal and political achievements. Foremost among his personal achievements was the dignity and apparent lack of bitterness with which he emerged from 27 years of imprisonment by the apartheid regime in South Africa. He had the personal grace to embody the long struggle against racism and for democracy when he re-entered the public sphere in 1990 and by nearly all accounts he set an example of leadership during his own long years in gaol. During this period Mandela was himself rather forgotten for much of the time, out of...