On the same day that our international jurist, Navi Pillay, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, crowds of people under the banner of March and March descended on Home Affairs offices in Durban and Soweto, threatening foreign asylum-seekers, setting vehicles alight, and looting shops; and at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, an anti-foreigner demonstrator armed […]

Amidst the ongoing xenophobic actions, the strengthening of exclusionary and populist narratives, and the heartrending realities of repatriation, a recent judgement of the Constitutional Court1 provides a step forward in securing a measure of justice around the vexed question of the exclusion of asylum seekers from accessing documentation necessary for them to stay in the […]

The various marches on June 30th against the presence of African foreigners in South Africa seemed to go off without the degree of chaos, violence and destruction that many people were afraid of. Among the many lessons that can be drawn from the day, and from the campaign preceding it, at least three concern issues […]

In Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, Lady Bracknell famously admonishes the orphan Jack Worthing: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Response – SAPS Corruption – Misfortune or Carelessness by Mike Pothier

In President Ramaphosa’s long speech, just shy of two hours, certain words and phrases were repeated hundreds of times: ‘government will’; ‘we are going to’; ‘South Africa must’; ‘we need to’. All these point to the future, to things that have not happened yet but which, we are assured, are in the pipeline. Response – […]