Richard Pithouse

In Texaco, his novel about the history of a shack settlement in Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau writes of a ‘proletariat without factories, workshops, and work, and without bosses, in the muddle of odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers.’ But Texaco is a

On 6 December 2011, 50 years will have passed since the death of Frantz Fanon.

Elections can be of critical importance but they’re not always all that they’re cracked up to be. No one who has lived under a dictatorship or entrenched corruption would ever dismiss the right to vote in a free and fair election as trivial.

There are moments when a society has to step back from the ordinary thrum of day-to-day life and ask itself how it has become what it has become.

As the first unconfirmed reports of airborne attacks on protestors in Tripoli and Benghazi reached Al Jazeera the station crossed to a spokesperson for the European Union. There was talk of the need to affirm ‘European values’.

The service delivery myth wasn't invented in South Africa. But our chattering classes have taken to it with more enthusiasm than a Karoo duck waddling towards the first puddle at the end of a drought.

The fear of violence, like the fear of monsters, is primal and universal. But the sensitive middle class soul who professes a deep revulsion at all forms of violence is quite likely to call the police or a private security company if he wakes to the sound of breaking glass.

The African National Congress (ANC), perhaps buoyed by a renewed sense of public confidence in the wake of the World Cup, is again moving against one of our fundamental democratic freedoms.


‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all.’
 – Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin, 1920.