Heritage Day, marked on 24 September, is a very special holiday day in our beautiful country. On this day, we celebrate our common humanity, with its rich tapestry of diverse and colourful cultures. We celebrate the many languages spoken in our country; the variety of religious beliefs; and the freedom we enjoy to openly express…
Mandla Nkomfe is the Deputy Chairperson of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation. In this piece, he calls on South Africans to reimagine heritage, centered on values of social justice, non-racialism, solidarity and common humanity A TIME TO RETHINK OUR IDEAS OF HERITAGE Nationally, September is the month in which South Africans celebrate our heritage as a…
Our country has been through close to 15 years of significant disruption and turmoil because o endemic corruption across society, manifested most dramatically by the state capture project under former President Zuma. However, the corruption goes beyond just government and we saw manifestations of it in business and broader civil society. If one adds to…
September 24 will mark Heritage Day in South Africa. Over time, traditional regalia, different cuisine including braais, have signified the day, a very colourful public holiday at that. We seldom speak of meaning and deeper substance to Heritage Day, and perhaps at the crossroads our beautiful country finds itself in, now is the time to…
Young people took up the opportunity to close off 2020 in high spirits, when over a hundred members of the Kathrada Youth Club participants gathered at Lenasia’s Model Primary School in Lenasia to attend the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation’s Youth Impact Festival on December 12, 2020. ZukoMasabalala, who attended the conference, shares his thoughts on this learning experience. I come from Protea Glen, a small and quite neighbourhood in Soweto…
“Climate justice is social justice.” This phrase from the Climate Justice Charter, being handed over to Parliament today, is perhaps the most important in the document. It sums up the core of what our struggles as progressive activists will be over the next generation at least. That one line alone, is a stark reminder of…
Executive Director of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, Neeshan Balton, reflects on George Bizos’ simple, yet significant contribution to Nelson Mandela’s speech from the dock. He says that support for the #OrangeMaskFridays campaign against Covid-19 corruption is similarly simple, yet impactful. Balton states that it can go a long way to protect state resources so that…
If we are, indeed, to build inclusive public services and a non-racial country, we need to deal with the structural barriers, seen and unseen, which still stubbornly sit with us almost three decades in our constitutional democracy.
Even when there was a legal chance of him getting off with a lesser sentence during the 1964 Rivonia Trial, he chose to stand alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and the other trialists and accept the final judgement, be it death or life sentence.
Looking back, we now know that his term as Chairperson coincided with the beginning of state capture. Despite hostility from some in the ANC, Prof Turok stood steadfast in his commitment to the values of the ANC and the Constitution. This was at a time when corrupt elements were trying to marginalise those who stood in their way and frustrate any investigation.