Tuesday, 31 January 2023
Dennis Webster has a research background in labour, land and housing. He writes about cities, farmwork and popular politics in rural areas.
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.
Amid a climate crisis, the ancient stories in South Africa’s fossils contain crucial lessons for the planet. But who the people are that reveal these stories is as important.
Ferrero factory workers have won the first battle in what might become one of South Africa’s next wars on casual and precarious work.
In an environment where activism against mining is becoming increasingly deadly, Nonhle Mbuthuma’s life may be at risk.
Years of poor management and administration coupled with a devastating Covid-19 lockdown mean that the coming economic storm will hit South Africa’s most vulnerable hardest.