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South Africa has a long history of alternative media. During the 1980s there was a host of community and grassroots newspapers that supplied content that ran counter to the prevailing attitudes of the times. In addition, a thriving small press and underground press carried voices that would not have been heard in the mainstream, corporate media. Pirate radio projects operated by Caset were the forerunners of the country's community radio and small pamphlets and samizdat were included in the mix.[ citation needed ]
The advocacy journalism of early activist titles was in stark contrast to the complacency of the country's large media houses. While many of the counterculture titles associated with the apartheid struggle no longer exist, there has been a resurgence of alternative media and the small press after a period of decline, notable because large corporates absorbed many of the so-called "struggle" journalists and mopped up small publishing houses. These media projects involve multi-media as well as electronic journalism.[ citation needed ]
However, there are some who criticise what they call a lack of real alternative media in South Africa. [1]
Since the end of Apartheid, there has been a dearth of alternative media in South Africa as most of it got incorporated into mainstream corporate media as well as government and political party organising. Some of South Africa's largest social movements and other activist organisations have an online presence of alternative blogs and activist websites. According to the social movements, the importance of these alternative media sites are that they provide a way for 'poor people to speak for themselves'. [2] These include:
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The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, formerly known as the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZabFed), is a platformist–especifista anarchist political organisation in South Africa, based primarily in Johannesburg. The word zabalaza means "struggle" in isiZulu and isiXhosa. Initially, as ZabFed, it was a federation of pre-existing collectives, mainly in Soweto and Johannesburg. It is now a unitary organisation based on individual applications for membership, describing itself as a "federation of individuals". Historically the majority of members have been people of colour. Initially the ZACF had sections in both South Africa and Swaziland. The two sections were split in 2007, but the Swazi group faltered in 2008. Currently the ZACF also recruits in Zimbabwe. Members have historically faced repression in both Swaziland and South Africa.
Anarchism in South Africa dates to the 1880s, and played a major role in the labour and socialist movements from the turn of the twentieth century through to the 1920s. The early South African anarchist movement was strongly syndicalist. The ascendance of Marxism–Leninism following the Russian Revolution, along with state repression, resulted in most of the movement going over to the Comintern line, with the remainder consigned to irrelevance. There were slight traces of anarchist or revolutionary syndicalist influence in some of the independent left-wing groups which resisted the apartheid government from the 1970s onward, but anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism as a distinct movement only began re-emerging in South Africa in the early 1990s. It remains a minority current in South African politics.
Khayelitsha is a township in Western Cape, South Africa, on the Cape Flats in the City of Cape Town. The name is Xhosa for New Home. It is reputed to be the largest and fastest-growing township in South Africa.
Amandla in the Nguni languages means "power". The word was a popular rallying cry in the days of resistance against apartheid, used by the African National Congress and its allies. The leader of a group would call out "Amandla!" and the crowd would respond with "Awethu" or "Ngawethu!", completing the South African version of the rallying cry "power to the people!". The word is still associated with struggles against oppression.
One Settler, One Bullet was a rallying cry and slogan originated by the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA), the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), during the struggle of the 1980s against apartheid in South Africa. The slogan parodied the African National Congress's slogan 'One Man, One Vote', which eventually became 'One Person, One Vote'. It is not to be confused with the controversial protest song "Dubul' ibhunu".
Abahlali baseMjondolo is a shack dwellers' movement in South Africa which organised land occupations, builds collectives, and campaigns against evictions and xenophobia and for public housing. The movement grew out of a road blockade organised from the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the city of Durban. As of June 2021 it claims to have "more than 100 000 members in 86 branches across five provinces".
Nigel Gibson is a British activist, a scholar specialising in philosophy and author whose work has focussed, in particular, on Frantz Fanon. Edward Said described Gibson's work as "rigorous and subtle". He has been described as a leading figure in Fanon scholarship.
The "Third Force" was a term used by leaders of the ANC during the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to a clandestine force believed to be responsible for a surge in violence in KwaZulu-Natal, and townships around and south of the Witwatersrand.
The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign was a non-racial popular movement made up of poor and oppressed communities in Cape Town, South Africa. It was formed in November 2000 with the aim of fighting evictions, water cut-offs and poor health services, obtaining free electricity, securing decent housing, and opposing police brutality.
The Poor People's Alliance is a network of radical grassroots movements in South Africa. It was formed in 2008 after the Action Alliance, formed in December 2006, was expanded to include two more organisations.
No Land! No House! No Vote! is the name of a campaign by a number of poor people's movements in South Africa that calls for the boycotting of the vote and a general rejection of party politics and vote banking. The name is meant to imply that if government does not deliver on issues important to affected communities these movements will not vote.
Martin Legassick (1940–2016) was a South African historian and Marxist activist. He died on 1 March 2016 after a battle with cancer. He was one of the central figures in the "revisionist" school of South African historiography that, drawing on Marxism, revolutionised the study of the social formation of Apartheid by highlighting the importance of political economy, class contradictions and imperialism. He was also a key figure in the independent left in South Africa from the 1970s, and a critic, from the left, of many of the analytical and strategic positions taken by the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, as well as their understanding of South African history. The author of numerous books, mainly on the history of colonialism and capitalism, he collected many of his key political writings in his 2007 book Towards Socialist Democracy.
Mzonke Poni is an activist in Cape Town. He is the former chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape and was previously a leader of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. The Sunday Times has described him as "the face of an ANC nightmare - an angry activist mobilising the township masses to protest at what he calls the government's failure to create a better life for the poor."
South Africa has been dubbed "the protest capital of the world", with one of the highest rates of public protests in the world.
Rubin Phillip is bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Natal. The great-grandchild of indentured labourers from Andhra Pradesh, Phillip is the first of East Indian heritage in South Africa to hold the position of Bishop of Natal. He grew up in Clairwood, a suburb of Durban with a large concentration of people of Indian ethnicity, in a non-religious household, but converted to Christianity. He was a noted anti-apartheid activist and spent three years under house arrest in the 1970s and was banned in 1973. He was enthroned as bishop in February 2000.
No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way is an anthology published in 2011 of 45 factual tales written and edited by the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers.
The attack on Kennedy Road in Durban, South Africa, occurred on 26 September 2009. A mob of men armed with bush knives, guns and bottles entered the Kennedy Road informal settlement searching for leaders of the shackdwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM). They looted shacks and threatened residents, before attacking a hall where a youth meeting was happening. Two people were killed and around a thousand were displaced. In the aftermath, AbM representatives such as S'bu Zikode went into hiding and thirteen AbM members were arrested.
The Constitution of South Africa protects all basic political freedoms. However, there have been many incidents of political repression, dating back to at least 2002, as well as threats of future repression in violation of this constitution leading some analysts, civil society organisations and popular movements to conclude that there is a new climate of political repression or a decline in political tolerance.
Nqobile Nzuza was a resident in the Marikana Land Occupation in Cato Crest, Durban, South Africa. She was a member of the shackdwellers' social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo.
