Litnet

"When powerful states describe a relationship as mutually beneficial, who gets to define the mutuality?"

"Critical thinking is a muscle, not a genetic trait. Its best gymnasium is time; its worst is speed. But given the busy weeks of a school term, and the persistence of continuous assessment – embedded into the CAPS system – it is difficult to believe these two principles swim in the same pool."

"Nuremberg succeeds as a courtroom drama and as an exploration of the psychology of evil. It is less successful as an examination of the broader political and nationalist currents that produced Nazi Germany."

"One might have thought the European success in having scrubbed their atmosphere over the past 50 years would be a cause for celebration. Instead, thousands of people are, or will soon be, dying prematurely as a result, unless cooler weather returns soon."

"With all this planned weekly rolling mass action, there is one question that is getting louder and louder: Who is funding these 'leaders' and organisations?"

"The tragedy is that the theatre works. A crowd with placards may be ignored. The image of a crowd with sticks and spears travels. The image circulates. The message hardens. Migrants see it."

"We have little solid proof that foreign workers are the reason South Africans cannot find jobs, or that removing them would open those jobs to anyone else. What economics can speak to with more assurance is the other side of the ledger: the measurable consequences of acting on the anger." | "Ons het egter min bewyse dat buitelandse werkers wel die rede is waarom Suid-Afrikaners nie werk kry nie, of dat hul verwydering daardie poste vir iemand anders sal oopmaak. Wat ons wel beter kan meet, is wat gebeur wanneer daardie woede in beleid omgesit word."

"In 2008, I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, where I not only witnessed documented accounts of the different atrocities, but also stood next to the mass grave where 250 000 bodies are interred."

"Cassinga became another Guernica, and today it symbolises the sacrifices made during the liberation struggle, not only against South Africa but also against the Germans, who occupied Namibia as the colonial power until the First World War."

"This is where Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma enters the stage. She is not the cause of South Africa’s migration crisis. She is a symptom of our poverty of ideas."

"The world did not embrace Abdullah Ibrahim despite where he came from. It embraced him because he carried where he came from so completely."

"Viewed in its entirety, Mathe’s biography is ultimately a meditation on memory, political ownership and historical erasure."

"We are no longer merely integrating technology into business. We are redesigning the architecture of human work itself."

"Curriculum change is ongoing, and we cannot instantly label these campaigns as an immediate cause. But the proximity of a new history CAPS to a charged political movement does make it harder to view the revision within a purely pedagogical space."

"Politics and international relations cannot function as a marketplace alone."

"Yet, large metros such as Johannesburg, eThekwini and Gqeberha continue to face severe wastewater management challenges, including failing treatment works and pollution. In Emfuleni in Gauteng, longstanding dysfunction in wastewater systems has caused chronic pollution of the Vaal River system and in urban areas, despite several national interventions. These are not isolated cases, but are symptomatic of the wider municipal system. Some municipalities – often supported by stronger technical capacity or regional water boards – perform relatively better, but these remain too few."

"In this callous, dismaying age, it is yet another symptom of our collective amnesia: about our painful journey to becoming a democracy, laced with violence; about the failure of most Afrikaner intellectuals to challenge the apartheid order; and about the pioneering role played by those who did."

"The bittereinder dying of typhoid in a Bloemfontein camp and the black child buried without a name in a Free State field are not statistics in a structural argument; they are the argument. A curriculum that cannot make a schoolchild feel the weight of those deaths in their own chest has failed at its most essential task."

"If our universe is a simulation, its creators must know more than the simulated agents, particularly about the origin and structure of the system."

"This essay concerns itself with a recurring structure in Western historical consciousness: the production of fear as a precondition for domination. Fear, in this tradition, is rarely spontaneous. It is cultivated, narrativised and subsequently moralised until it acquires the character of providence."