How will we, ordinary South Africans, know when the cherished dream of a non-racial society has been achieved? How will such a society manifest itself? In other words, will we be able to recognize such a society if it “knocked at our door”? We are not talking about our political parties, which in their wisdom, would give us a perplexing array of policies on race and proposals on how to navigate this thorny issue in our country. The Black Consciousness Movement, for instance, which shaped my political outlook, believe the desired open society can best be pursued through the employment of Black Consciousness as a mobilization and conscientisation strategy...

Read more • 1 Comments

Today is once again that time of the year when learners and their families are jubilant because of the Matric Results of 2011. AZAPO joins the millions of South Africans in this jubilation and congratulates all successful Grade 12 learners. It is heartening to note that 12 years of dedication and hard work yielded positive results. In a sense the 70.2% national pass rate could be a signal that 2011 was on the whole a productive year of schooling. The nation looks forward to even greater achievements at the end of 2012...

Read more • 0 Comments

The Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) has always insisted that AZANIA (South Africa) is a unitary state. While other political parties opted for federalism and the balkanisation of AZANIA into “Bantustan-like” units, AZAPO maintained the unitary state stance through its characteristic slogan of “ONE AZANIA, ONE NATION”. AZAPO rejects with contempt the balkanisation of AZANIA into separate semi-autonomous units, known as “provincial governments”. The rationale AZAPO advances for the abolishment of provincial governments is simply that these “units” are an unnecessary duplication of national government...

Read more • 0 Comments

Way back in the seventies, Steve Bantu Biko wrote about the dominant role fear played in South African politics. In his essay: Fear – an Important Determinant in South African Politics, he describes how whites fearing blacks, blacks fearing whites and the government fearing blacks, drove the conduct of politics in the country. It is that fear for blacks that propelled whites to enact one heinous law after another and build a formidable security establishment that at times appeared impregnable. You would have thought that with the advent of democracy seventeen years ago, fear in politics, together with the dompas and all it implied, would be relegated to the backwaters of history...

Read more • 0 Comments

There is a picture hanging in our Constituency Office. It is a picture of the former Editor of the World, the late Percy Qoboza, being led to a Police car by policemen in dark glasses, some of them in safari shorts. We know that prior to that, Mr Qoboza had been called in by Jimmy Kruger, and later by Prime Minister John Vorster, who reprimanded him for being the only Editor who published the Open Letter written by the Black People’s Convention...

Read more • 0 Comments