Friday, 22 October 2021
Dennis has a research background in labour, land and housing. He writes about cities, farm work and popular politics in the countryside.
An independent candidate is contesting the local government elections in a former Eastern Cape Bantustan, revealing deep fault lines in the party’s ward candidate nomination process.
The challenges of the pandemic are not new, but the country and the continent still face a long road to adequate vaccination and getting coronavirus infections under control.
The most highly mutated Covid-19 variant yet is now circulating in most of the country.
Nearly a decade ago, the police slaughtered 34 men at Marikana, erasing parents, life partners and breadwinners. We dare not forget.
In the absence of the state, communities are shaping their own slow recovery from days of rioting and destruction. They are hopeful in some places, hateful in others.
In the township that’s one of the hotspots of the uprising in Gauteng, riots have stoked anxiety and solidarity in equal measure among the ordinary people seeing them out in their ordinary homes.
The third wave has pummelled the country’s economic hub. It is likely a foretaste of what the Delta variant will do to a largely unvaccinated population.
Gauteng’s premier may have said the academic hospital in Johannesburg will soon reopen, but senior clinicians who resorted to protesting in an effort to make it happen remain wary.
The hope and despair at recent diggings near KwaHlathi say a lot about the region, where impoverished residents are mostly neglected and have nothing to lose.
While officials remain entangled in bureaucratic knots, clinicians warn that the continued closure of the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital risks a ‘humanitarian disaster’.
While the South African government and its workers try to navigate entrenched stalemates on the public sector wage bill, lawmakers are considering legislating debt ceilings.
Gold made Johannesburg. Today, a lesser-known mineral shapes the lives of some of the city’s impoverished residents.
To celebrate Workers’ Day, we go back in time. In Durban in 1973, South African workers were raising their voices for better conditions and their fists against the system of apartheid.
South African scientists have played a crucial role in global Covid-19 research. We go behind the scenes with one of them. Also, residents of Cape Town’s historic Kalk Bay feel the creep of gentrification.
New variants are now the priority in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. One of South Africa’s leading virologists tells us why that battle has only just begun.
We tell the story of an 80-year-old Joburger who shows us how water shaped the city into what it is today. Also, who are the Africans leading the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights?
The Modi regime detains an Indian comedian for a joke he didn’t tell as it clamps down on ‘dissent’. Why people share fake news. And the story of Miriam Makeba and the 1980s hit song Just the Two of Us.
One million new job seekers trying to enter South Africa’s post-lockdown labour market have driven unemployment numbers to record levels.
Unprecedented increases in South Africa’s unemployment levels were largely reversed after the easing of the hard lockdown instituted to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
South Africa is the most unequal country in the world economically. Here’s a way to fix that. Also, thinker Noam Chomsky tells us how to achieve peace in the Middle East.
In Joburg’s inner city, existing political fault lines are providing fertile ground for the spread of misinformation, with vaccine scepticism taking hold.