The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. He holds an MA in philosophy and worked as an academic for many years. He has published widely in academic and popular publications and in recent years has been particularly interested in popular struggles for just cities.
Richard Pithouse -
The deep roots of May Day lie in the ancient forests of Europe. Long before the idea of one God, one stern God, had made its way across the Mediterranean Spring was marked by planting trees, adorning people and homes with sprigs, blossoms and garlands, the erection of Maypoles, lighting bonfires on hilltops, dancing, drinking and general revelry. This celebration of the shared bounty of the natural world was incorporated, along with many other ideas and festivals, into European Christianity...
Richard Pithouse -
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” - George Elliot, Middlemarch, 1874
The Economist recently celebrated Margaret Thatcher for her “willingness to stand up to tyranny”. For Barack Obama she was "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty". This is, plainly, what her old friend...
Richard Pithouse -
In his speech at the memorial service for the soldiers who were killed in the Central African Republic Jacob Zuma presented us, and not for the first time, with the idea that we should receive another accumulation of bodies – of black bodies – as a tragedy, as a cruel consequence of the random movement of the wheel of fortune. Thabo Mbeki, watching our steady accretion of 'tragedies' from the sidelines, might, perhaps, have recalled a line from Shakespeare: “Our remedies oft...
Richard Pithouse -
In the colonies ….the agents of government speak the language of pure force. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
All societies are managed with a mixture of force and consent. But in South Africa like, say, India or Mexico, violence, or the threat of violence, is woven so tightly into the banalities and intimacies of day to day life that it is part of the deep structure of things. And it is not simply a matter, as many politicians would like us to believe, of criminality...
Richard Pithouse -
On Friday night Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in a local bar where he was watching a football game on television. It was a well organised hit on a man who had, for years, been at the centre of a local struggle around land and housing - the keenest point of conflict between citizens and the local state – in Cato Crest in Durban.
Qumbelo made a remarkably bold entrance onto the local political stage on Freedom Day in 2005. Thabo Mbeki was set to speak in the King's Park stadium...
Richard Pithouse -
Not so long ago the middle classes in the world created by British colonialism used to cloak their claim to privilege in the stifling rituals of bourgeois respectability. These days consumerism is increasingly the royal road into the golden circle of authorised superiority. It's a more democratic ideology in the sense that it is less firmly tied to national or ethnic conceptions of culture. A shopping mall in Johannesburg is not very different to a mall in Jakarta or the airport in Dubai....
