Squatting around Hampstead Heath

Reflections of a Wayward Boy (31) can also be found: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-05-11-reflections-of-a-wayward-boy-squatting-on-hampstead-heath/ For all my tendency to optimism, I have always harboured a degree of caution. So, when we sold up everything in New Zealand and shipped ourselves and more than a tonne of books, and other educational gear to start the ANC primary school in […]

Mayday, Mayday for May Day

These are parlous times for trade unions, not just in South Africa, but globally. And as May Day 2022 dawns once favoured slogans such Phambili basebenzi! Forward [with the] workers! should perhaps, more appropriately, give way this year to the international radio distress signal: Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. For, almost everywhere, the labour movement is floundering, […]

A simplistic & anti-democratic blame game

(First published by Fin24 and City Press) More than 20 years ago, before its quite recent gentrification, I moved into the Cape Town seaside suburb of Muizenberg which then housed, courtesy of the United Nations, a large group of Angolan and DRC refugees. These new arrivals spoke foreign languages — mainly French, Lingala and Portuguese […]

Reflections of a Wayward Boy: Somafco

South Africa’s child care catastrophe

(First published in City Press, South Africa, 22.04,03) Working families are always the prime sufferers when catastrophe strikes, be it war, famine, flood or often, callous disregard by powers that be. And it is children who carry the long-term consequences of trauma, dislocation and deprivation with many growing in to adulthood with their potential, physically, […]

Challenging the US Navy — in red underpants

How SA govt dodged an agreed pay deal

(First published on Fin24.com) There is considerable anger throughout the labour movement at the ruling by the Constitutional Court, backing lower court decisions, that the government had the right to renege on the third year of a three-year pay deal with the public sector. When all the facts are taken into account, it is an […]

Need for a new anti-privatisation fight

(First published on Fin24 and City Press, South Africa 18 & 20 February 2022) There was nothing new in the effective nod to privatisation in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address last week. But it — and the largely muted opposition to it — seemed perhaps to indicate the end of a 25-year […]