A bust of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. Verwoerd believed that black people should know their place – and that included staying away from ‘white’ jobs.
Juda Ngwenya/Reuters
Vocational training is regarded as “low status” in South Africa. Much of the negativity around technical and vocational work seems to lie in the country’s history.
A still from the 2015 film ‘Necktie Youth’. Film in South Africa needs to undergo radical change if it is to shed the shackles of the past.
Urucu Media/Hanro Havenga
The impact that the system of conscription had on the roughly 600,000 white men who became both pawns and agents of the apartheid state has seldom been publicly acknowledged.
Dockworkers in Australia, pictured here alongside other trade union members in a march through central Melbourne, acted in solidarity with South African workers in the 1980s.
Reuters
There’s a fierce debate underway about changing university curricula in Africa and the UK to be less Eurocentric. Three academics offer their suggestions for a decolonised reading list.
Children develop based on their interactions with people, books and cultural artefacts. History textbooks could have a great deal to teach them about empathy.
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Are history textbooks constructing the past in a way that allows learners to develop empathy by walking in many different people’s shoes?
The more than two million houses built by the state and transferred to the residents as freehold property, many with solar energy, are the most visible of the Freedom Charter’s achievements.
Reuters
The Freedom Charter, adopted at a meeting in Soweto on June 25-26 1955, triggered a paradigm shift in thinking about the democratic rights of black South Africans and their protection under the law.
Liberalism means something completely different in South Africa compared with the US and UK, and has racist connotations.
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Liberalism is a dirty word for the majority of South Africans. This goes back to early colonialism. Liberals opposed apartheid but not the close relationship between capitalism and apartheid.
A page from a 1934 sex education manual that, like many of its era, managed to be less about sex than about policing racial boundaries.
RPH West, Facts about Ourselves for Growing Boys and Girls (Public Health Department of the City of Johannesburg and the South African Red Cross Society, 1934). Wits Historical Papers, South African Institute of Race Relations Collection, AD 843 RJ/NA 18.
In South Africa’s segregated pre-apartheid state, even sex education was racialised. Christian missionaries had very different lessons for black and white children.
A 3rd year chemical engineering student from the University of Cape Town in a vacation “boot camp” to help with supplementary exam preparation.
Jennifer Case
The black middle class occupies a complex and sometimes precarious position in society, one that requires constant renegotiation.
Sanctions intended to be biting have more often been toothless and about giving supporters the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from taking a principled stand.
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The release of Eugene de Kock, former commander of the notorious Vlakplaas counterinsurgency unit responsible for numerous clandestine assassinations in apartheid South Africa, raises a number of critical…
The beginning of the academic year in South Africa is the most stressful time for parents of children who come from poor, rural and working class backgrounds. This when they have to confront the difficult…
Glasgow’s Mandela friendship is only part of Scotland’s apartheid story.
Chris Bacon
At different times ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games, various politicians called for politics to be kept out of the event. This didn’t prevent the organisers paying tribute to Glasgow’s part in the…
Where is education going for South Africa’s ‘Born Frees’?
teachandlearn
Since the dawn of democracy in South Africa 20 years ago, pass rates in the country’s end-of-school exam – commonly known as the matric – have been steadily on the rise, despite indications that the schooling…
The Pistorius trial has drawn attention to attitudes to women in South Africa.
Gianluigi Guercia/Pool/EPA
As South Africa, in election week, watches the trial of Oscar Pistorius for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, my perception is that our society is experiencing an overall paroxysm of social…
Icon and reality: Nelson and Winnie Mandela as seen on screen.
Production Companies Videovision Entertainment Distant Horizon Origin Pictures (in association with) Pathé
The timing could not have been more poignant: as South African president Jacob Zuma announced to the world that Nelson Mandela, the father of his nation, had breathed his last, Mandela’s daughters, Zenani…
Apartheid legacies of corruption and violence have held South Africa back, but there is still hope.
Julien Behal/PA
South Africa is not the most comfortable country to live in. Unemployment levels dwarf those in the troubled economies of Europe. The unemployed survive because families redistribute income internally…
Many fine words of tribute were uttered as some of the world’s most powerful people gather to pay tribute to former President Nelson Mandela. In spite of the rain, thousands gathered to hear the tributes…