http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=1079962

To be silent is to invite deserved contempt from rulers
20 October 2009
BOLEKAJA! - Andile Mngxitama

Andile Mngxitama

OUR country is now officially designated the most unequal society on earth.

What a dishonourable prize! South Africans are moving in two sharply opposite directions – a minority getting richer and living in unbelievable comfort, while the majority are getting poorer and are left to misery and despair.

Their hope lies increasingly in picking up a rock to throw at the helpless but arrogant local politician in what is fast becoming a nation of service delivery protests.

http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=1047617

Cut the stunts and do something real
11 August 2009
BOLEKAJA! - Andile Mngxitama

MINISTER of human Settlements Tokyo Sexwale spent one night with the Diepsloot poor – then he wrote a blow-by-blow account for the newspapers.

Apparently he is now armed with the views and concerns of that communities’ poor and will be handing in a report to the cabinet.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this comical political posturing.

The minister undertook this act of experiencing poverty for one night in full view of the admiring media. He endured, he reports, a night of untold discomfort.

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55639

Why Steve Biko wouldn’t vote

South Africa is on the verge of going to its fourth national election since 1994.[1] The socio-political changes which have occurred in the country for past 15 years point to a dramatic failure to realise the dream of liberation as developed by Steve Biko. Here I develop an argument for why Biko, like so many, would not be voting.

BIKO’S CONCEPTION OF LIBERATION

Biko’s idea of liberation is fundamentally anti-racist and anti-capitalist, as opposed to being anti-racialist, non-racialist and intergrationist – these latter conceptions of change naturally lead to the de-racialisation of capitalism and thereby the legitimation of the white supremacist political, economic and social existence created over the last 350 years in South Africa. Biko’s framing of the fundamental contradiction in South Africa as one of white racism emanates from his conception of capitalism as it emerged in the country as an inherently racist project. In his words then:

http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4598012

Steve Biko's paradise lost
This extract from Biko Lives! looks at early black consciousness and today's South Africa

September 07, 2008 Edition 2

"This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs." - Steve Biko (1972)

Democracy's new untouchables
ANDILE MNGXITAMA: COMMENT - Jul 29 2008 06:00

There is something sickeningly rotten about the hypocrisy of our society. The very foundations of our post-1994 society were birthed on forked tongues. What else do we make of the preamble to our Constitution, which speaks movingly about "past injustices" and commitment to a society driven by "democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights" and the everyday treatment meted out to the racialised vulnerables of our society?

It doesn't stop there. The Constitution promises that "every citizen" shall be "equally protected by law". Really? How do we account for the violations of sex workers permitted by the police?

We are not all like that: the monster bares its fangs

by Andile Mngxitama

The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. The front pages are a festival of beastly pictures of the victims of the negrophobic blood letting which has gripped South Africa in the past weeks. I dreaded opening a newspaper for days - afraid of being confronted by yet another grisly product of the negrophobic xenophobic violence, which by the end of week three had claimed the lives of about one hundred people and displaced about 100 000, according to some estimates. The mind spins out of the axis of the normal.

'Apartheid state remains'
Ferial Haffajee
28 May 2008 06:00

Often, when I read your articles, I wonder, who is writing? Malcolm X of Ku Klux Klan-era America or Andile Mngxitama of liberated Azania. Is your thesis of the world and of your country not caught in the past?

The Ku Klux Klan and lynching have simply mutated into the prison industrial complex, the electric chair and the needle. Black America is still under siege.

Liberated Azania is a nice thought, but if you have seen what I have seen then you’d be less celebratory. What do you think the millions of landless and hungry would say to this or the harassed and criminalised Abahlali baseMjondolo [a shack-dwellers’ movement in KwaZulu-Natal] or the communities facing violent forced removals from platinum areas in Limpopo and the North West?