More than 50 years ago, in Kliptown, thousands of people adopted a Freedom Charter which proclaimed that "the people shall govern". How might they have felt if they could imagine a day when the leadership of the African National Congress would insist...
Sometimes, progress can look like a mess -- particularly for those who prefer not to see it. An excellent example is the current state of African politics.
As it often does, the continent is offering Afro-pessimists -- a long, fancy word for peopl...
What do the election of Jacob Zuma and Eskom's power cuts have in common? Both bring out the racial demons buried just beneath the surface of the minds of many white South Africans.
It was only a matter of time before the power cuts brought the ra...
Is it only us, or do all changing societies not know when to cheer and when to worry?
The latest example showing that South Africans often wring their hands at things we should cheer -- and ignore problems we should wring our hands about -- is the...
One of the few certainties about our politics is that things usually do not turn out nearly as bad, or as good, as we expect. The signs suggest that the political drama that the re-charging of Jacob Zuma will spark in 2008 will broadly follow this pa...
OK, so we know now that we are not Zimbabwe. It will take a whole lot longer before we know clearly what we are -- or, rather, what we are becoming.
The key implication of the Zuma victory is, surely, the point made by some grassroots delegates an...
We say we want democracy -- but we don’t seem to like it much when we see it. How else to interpret the breast-beating from commentators and some delegates here at Polokwane after the opening day of the ANC conference?
Most of us no doubt know b...
If you want to know why ANC policy won’t change dramatically whoever wins in Polokwane, take a look at the front page of one of our daily business newspapers on Tuesday morning, which features a photo of Jacob Zuma, Tokyo Sexwale and Zwelinzima Vav...
It is more than a little ironic that ANC leaders who once fought so hard to ensure that all of us can vote freely have spent the past few weeks trying to convince us that those South Africans who actually belong to the movement should have far less o...
If you want to know why you should not take seriously reports promising that the US "peace initiative" in Annapolis will end conflict in the Middle East, it may be useful to recall something of our own journalistic past.
During the height of apart...
Steven Friedman is a research associate at Idasa and visiting professor of politics at Rhodes University. He is a newspaper columnist and a media commentator on South African politics. His academic speciality is the study of democracy. He wrote Building Tomorrow Today, a study of the trade-union movement, and edited two studies of the South African transition.
