Foreign Affairs: Trump’s Plan for Palestine Looks a Lot Like Apartheid

The apartheid government ultimately created only four ostensibly independent Bantustans (Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei, and Transkei) and six supposedly self-governing territories. Foreign governments for the most part dismissed the puppet states for what they were; South Africa was the only country in the world to officially recognize the Bantustans, and the major decisions regarding their affairs were made exclusively in Pretoria. [...]

During these years, I learned, to my dismay, that no country in the world (with the exception of South Africa) contributed more to the economy of the Bantustans than Israel. Israelis built factories, neighborhoods, a hospital, and even a soccer stadium and an alligator farm in these South African puppet states. Israel went so far as to allow one of them, Bophuthatswana, to maintain a diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv, and its leader, Lucas Mangope--shunned by the entire world for advancing and legitimizing apartheid by cooperating with the South African regime--was a frequent guest in Israel. [...]

The details of the proposal, and the rhetoric used by both Trump and Netanyahu, made it clear that this was not a deal but rather the implementation of Netanyahu's long-standing plan to further entrench Israel's control of the West Bank by giving its residents disconnected enclaves of territory without granting them real freedom or basic political rights. That was precisely the goal of the old South African government's Bantustan policy, too.

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Aeon: It didn’t have to be this way

The document provoked an uproar. The media feasted on it, spreading the panic. The situation in Italy was certainly exceptional due to the sheer number of cases presenting themselves each day. It’s likely the first time that many of these doctors, especially the younger ones, were being faced with such harrowing choices. Yet, from an ethical point of view, the document was neither unprecedented nor revolutionary. In another context of scarce resources – organ donation – patients are routinely ranked on waiting lists using an algorithm. Standard criteria match donor organs to recipients using a calculation of the chances of the transplant’s success and the patient’s survival. More controversial criteria can apply too. For example, if someone has cirrhosis of the liver caused by drinking, their personal responsibility in causing the condition will, in some circumstances, be a factor that weighs against their receiving a transplant. [...]

There’s no such thing as a value-free model. Self-isolation and quarantine are much heavier physical and mental burdens for those who live alone. John Ioannidis, the professor of medicine at Stanford University who exposed the ‘replication crisis’ in social psychology and beyond, has argued since the beginning of the pandemic that the economic, social and mental health implications of lockdowns must be accounted for in cost-benefit public health calculations – including the deaths caused by disruption to the social fabric. We might end up looking back on coronavirus, Ioannidis said, as a ‘a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco’. There’s currently little evidence that the most aggressive measures work, and if they continue, they could end up causing more harm in the long term than riding an acute epidemic wave. However, discounting the future is a typically human bias – as health economists know well from studies of how people think about the consequences of smoking, drinking or failing to exercise. [...]

Younger generations have been asked to make huge sacrifices for older generations, with the expectation of only very limited benefits for their own health – and some big repercussions for their own physical and mental wellbeing, including the closure of universities and loss of opportunities to work. This is also the generation that will have to pay off the bulk of debts we’re now accruing to pay for government assistance packages. Beyond family ties, the moral basis for this request isn’t obvious. On the one hand, we’ve asked a lot from younger people, without really making the case for those policies. On the other hand, when younger generations make demands of older generations – for example, about climate change and the future health of the planet – older people in power seem to have a hard time accepting them. After asking younger people to do so much for the elderly during this crisis, perhaps we ought to give them something in return.

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Reuters: Economic 'game changer'? African leaders launch free-trade zone

It is hoped that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) - the largest since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994 - will help unlock Africa’s long-stymied economic potential by boosting intra-regional trade, strengthening supply chains and spreading expertise. [...]

Africa has much catching up to do: its intra-regional trade accounted for just 17% of exports in 2017 versus 59% in Asia and 69% in Europe, and Africa has missed out on the economic booms that other trade blocs have experienced in recent decades. [...]

Members have committed to eliminate tariffs on most goods, which will increase trade in the region by 15-25% in the medium term, but this would more than double if these other issues were dealt with, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates. [...]

The zone’s potential clout received a boost on Tuesday when Nigeria, the largest economy in Africa, agreed to sign the agreement at the summit. Benin has also since agreed to join. Fifty-four of the continent’s 55 states have now signed up, but only about half of these have ratified. [...]

The vast difference in countries’ economic heft is another complicating factor in negotiations. Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa account for over 50% of Africa’s cumulative GDP, while its six sovereign island nations represent about 1%.

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The Guardian Longreads: Who killed the prime minister? The unsolved murder that still haunts Sweden

The mystery of Palme’s death has become a national obsession. “One of my earliest memories is of my parents discussing who killed Palme,” a friend I met while living in Sweden for the past couple of years told me. “I can’t describe to you how deep this is in the Swedish soul.” The murder has inspired films, plays and music, and has even been cited as a factor in the worldwide explosion of Scandinavian crime fiction. A number of Swedish amateur detectives have devoted much of their lives to solving the case. Investigating it has led some of them to break the law and driven others to something approaching madness. [...]

On Sveavägen, where the shooting occurred, shock seemed to have taken over. Police failed to cordon off the crime scene properly, covering too small an area. One of the bullets was not found until two days later, when it was picked up from the pavement by a passerby. Mourners arriving in the hours after Palme’s death slipped past the tape to place flowers near the pool of blood; by trampling the crime scene, they rendered future searches for the killer’s footprints useless. Key witnesses were allowed to leave the scene without being interviewed. Löfgren, the broadcast journalist, was out in the area that night and hailed a cab to take him home. The driver had witnessed the killing but had not been questioned, Löfgren recalled with disbelief. “I phoned the police and said: ‘This guy here claims that he was a witness to the murder, and he’s still out driving a cab?!’” [...]

By the start of the 1990s, so much time and money had been spent fruitlessly pursuing Pettersson and the PKK that basic questions about the night of the murder remained unanswered. Where was the murder weapon, which was believed to be a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver? Why were witness reports of men with walkie talkies near the site of the killing not taken seriously? Was the police incompetence too extreme to be accidental? [...]

The first group was made up of pro-apartheid members of South Africa’s security and intelligence services. Palme was an outspoken opponent of the apartheid regime, and his government had given millions in humanitarian aid to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Theories about South African involvement in his murder have circulated since the earliest days of the case. They became particularly popular in 1996, when a former commander of a South African police hit squad alleged that Palme’s killing was part of Operation Long Reach, a top-secret programme to neutralise opposition to the apartheid government at home and abroad. In 1982, members of this operation had killed the anti-apartheid activist Ruth First in Mozambique and bombed the ANC’s London office.

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The Guardian: I fought South African apartheid. I see the same brutal policies in Israel

As a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist I look with horror on the far-right shift in Israel ahead of this month’s elections, and the impact in the Palestinian territories and worldwide.

Israel’s repression of Palestinian citizens, African refugees and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza has become more brutal over time. Ethnic cleansing, land seizure, home demolition, military occupation, bombing of Gaza and international law violations led Archbishop Tutu to declare that the treatment of Palestinians reminded him of apartheid, only worse. [...]

The parallels with South Africa are many. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently said: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and them alone.” [...]

The anti-apartheid movement grew over three decades, in concert with the liberation struggle of South Africa’s people, to make a decisive difference in toppling the racist regime. Europeans refused to buy apartheid fruit; there were sports boycotts; dockworkers from Liverpool to Melbourne refused to handle South African cargo; an academic boycott turned universities into apartheid-free zones; and arms sanctions helped to shift the balance against South Africa’s military.

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Quartz: Being single in your 30s isn’t bad luck, it’s a global phenomenon (November 13, 2018)

“One of the global trends that was really seen throughout many of the papers was the delay in marriage, especially among more educated classes of people, and especially for women,” she says. The trend showed up in papers from Jordan, China, the US, Rwanda, and Guatemala, and the list went on. (The papers are yet to be published, but some have been reviewed by Quartz.)

Diane Singerman, associate professor in the department of government at American University, Washington DC, coined the term “waithood” in 2008 after studying young people in the Middle East. In her conception, the term relates to both genders and is at root economic. In many places—such as Egypt, where some of Singerman’s research has focused—marriage is just too expensive for young people to manage, while having kids outside of that formal union isn’t yet socially acceptable. This kind of waithood can hit young men hard: A youth bulge across large parts of the world, high rates of unemployment, and low wages combine to hold men back from relationships (especially in places where high dowry payments are expected), and therefore from starting families. Even in places where it is possible to become a parent without an expensive wedding, fertility rates are falling: Inhorn mentions Greece, Spain, and France as facing age-related fertility problems, in part because young people can’t afford the trappings of adulthood, like their own place to live.[...]

In a range of places where women are able to access education and careers they have begun to do so with zeal, often overtaking their male counterparts. One key metric is attainment at university, where women globally are becoming the majority of students, both applying in greater numbers, as in Sweden, and completing more degrees, as in South Africa. While both men and women can experience waithood, the situation of singledom becomes more pressing for women as biological imperatives loom. Most people, globally, want children, and men can become fathers at later stages of life. But even with advances in fertility, there are clear indicators about the increased difficulties women can face getting pregnant later in life.

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Quartz: The Chinese and Soviets had a bigger role in supporting apartheid than we previously knew

This was supported (or at least connived at) by many western powers. That the US, Britain and France did this has been known, or at least suspected, for many years. Van Vuuren fills in the blanks and gives us plenty of new information on this. Although shocking this is less than astonishing.

What is really novel is that he uncovers a completely new set of actors: the Chinese and the Soviet Union. In the past it has been assumed that, for the most part, they were completely wedded to the liberation movements. The support from Moscow and Beijing for the African National Congress and—to a lesser extent—the Pan Africanist Congress, was so widely reported that few suspected there might be less than total solidarity between the communist powers and the liberation movements.[...]

The relationship that the book portrays between South Africa and the Chinese is just as complex. It involves purchases of Chinese military equipment – everything from machine guns to missiles and rocket launchers – using Congolese companies as a front. Sometimes the shipments were destined for South Africa’s Angolan allies, UNITA, sometimes not.

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openDemocracy: Attacks on women's ministries are a threat to democracy

This experience is not unique to Brazil. Many countries with women’s ministries face right-wing and religious attempts to eliminate or downgrade their influence – and in some cases, to change their mandates altogether. When this happens, it’s a strong signal that other democratic structures may also be at risk.[...]

Protecting women’s human rights was an issue for new democracies, and more established ones. The United States had legalised abortion in 1973, yet marital rape was exempt from the criminal code, women could be fired for being pregnant, and they couldn’t apply for a credit card. Irish women weren’t allowed to sit in pubs; women In Nigeria didn’t have the right to vote; divorce was illegal in Brazil, Chile, and South Africa.[...]

This was a groundbreaking step and a critical necessity to ensure the health, security, and basic human rights of women and girls. It was also well-received by countries internationally. At the end of the World Decade for Women in 1985, 127 UN member states had some kind of national institution focused on women. By 2010, all but four countries had an office like this.[...]

Rising populist movements with regressive social agendas are widely seen as threats to democracy. They are often defined by their anti-free press, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions, but they also share an open hostility to women’s human rights.

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The New Yorker: Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age

Some of these reassessments may have been provoked by the halo surrounding Gandhi, which has shone brightly ever since Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning bio-pic, in 1982. It was only then that bumper-sticker homilies Gandhi never uttered—“Be the change you wish to see in the world”—were attributed to him. (Donald Trump tweeted one of these fake quotes during his Presidential campaign, in 2016: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”) As Gandhi disappeared into T-shirts and Apple advertisements, it was easy to forget that this big-eared, cuddly icon of popular culture responded to an unprecedentedly violent and unstable period in human history, beginning with the intensification of imperialism and globalization in the late nineteenth century and continuing through two world wars. “Politics encircle us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries,” Gandhi once said. “I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.” His prolific writings in that turbulent era inspired thinkers as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Today, Gandhi’s political thought resonates again. In recent years, many scholars have asserted that he has much to say about the issues that make our present moment so volatile: inequality, resentment, the rise of demagoguery, and the breakdown of democratic governance. In several pioneering books and articles, the Indian thinker Ashis Nandy has presented Gandhi as boldly confronting the “hyper-masculine” political culture of his time, which sanctified “institutionalized violence and ruthless social Darwinism.” Writers such as Ajay Skaria, Shruti Kapila, Uday S. Mehta, Karuna Mantena, and Faisal Devji present a radical figure, who, diverging from the dominant ideologies of liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism, insisted on the need for self-transformation, moral persuasion, and sacrifice. The origins of Gandhi’s world view in Europe’s fin-de-siècle culture are also becoming clearer: Leela Gandhi persuasively links her great-grandfather’s outlook to an antimaterialist tradition that flourished in late-nineteenth-century Britain. She sees him as refashioning democracy, in opposition to a widespread striving for the will to power, into a “spiritual regimen of imperfectionism.”[...]

No one would be less surprised than Gandhi by neo-Fascist upsurges in what he called “nominal” Western democracies, which in his view were merely better at concealing their foundations of violence and exploitation than explicitly Fascist nations were. He thought that democracy in the West was “clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists,” and as long as legislators act like a “prostitute”—his infamous term for the British Parliament—and voters “take their cue from their newspapers which are often dishonest.”[...]

For these reasons and others, Gandhi thought that it was not enough to demand liberation from “exploitation and degradation,” as socialists tended to do. In 1925, in an article titled “What of the West?,” he argued that those who wished to “shun the evils of capital” would have to do nothing less than wholly “revise the view point of capital,” achieving an outlook in which “the multiplicity of material wants will not be the aim of life.” Indeed, Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization hinged on what he saw as its refusal to recognize limits. To a civilization shaped by unappeasable human will and ambition Gandhi counterposed a civilization organized around self-limitation and ethical conduct. “We shall cease to think of getting what we can, but we shall decline to receive what all cannot get,” he wrote. “The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all, and this can only be achieved by uttermost self-sacrifice.”

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99 Percent Invisible: Ponte City Tower

“If you lived in a high rise building with five or six hundred flats in it,” explains Smuts, “they weren’t going to go through each and every flat to come look for any illegal persons.” And over the years, many interracial families like the Smuts disappeared into one high rise apartment building in particular—a tower called Ponte City. “I don’t think there’s anybody in Johannesburg that doesn’t know Ponte,” Smuts says. “They might not have been there. But everybody knows Ponte.”

Looking at Johannesburg’s skyline, the 54-story tower is hard to miss—it is the tallest apartment building on the African continent. It is also distinctively shaped, a massive cylinder with an empty central core. The billboard wrapping its top like a crown also helps it stand out. For many, the building symbolizes Johannesburg—because over the past four decades, its fortunes have reflected the changing city around it. [...]

It was still illegal for black, colored, and Indian South Africans to live in these areas, but the scale and density of the inner city made the laws harder to enforce. A new term was coined to describe the increased mixing going out on—”graying“—and for many, gray areas were refuges, impossible for the police to close down and search all at once. Landlords would turn a blind eye to skin color, but, in exchange, illegal residents had to deal with rent increases and poor maintenance.

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The Guardian: Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth (Fri 3 Aug 2018)

Denialism, and related phenomena, are often portrayed as a “war on science”. This is an understandable but profound misunderstanding. Certainly, denialism and other forms of pseudo-scholarship do not follow mainstream scientific methodologies. Denialism does indeed represent a perversion of the scholarly method, and the science it produces rests on profoundly erroneous assumptions, but denialism does all this in the name of science and scholarship. Denialism aims to replace one kind of science with another – it does not aim to replace science itself. In fact, denialism constitutes a tribute to the prestige of science and scholarship in the modern world. Denialists are desperate for the public validation that science affords. [...]

Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral foundation; it is a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. An end to denialism is therefore a disturbing prospect, as it would involve these moral differences revealing themselves directly. But we need to start preparing for that eventuality, because denialism is starting to break down – and not in a good way.[...]

Those who were previously “forced” into Holocaust denial are starting to sense that it may be possible to publicly celebrate genocide once again, to revel in antisemitism’s finest hour. The heightened scrutiny of far-right movements in the last couple of years has unearthed statements that might once have remained unspoken, or only spoken behind closed doors. In August 2017, for example, one KKK leader told a journalist: “We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million [immigrants] is nothing.” A piece published by the Daily Stormer in advance of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville that same month ended: “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.” [...]

Not all denialists are taking these steps towards open acknowledgment of their desires. In some fields, the commitment to repressing desire remains strong. We are not yet at a stage when a climate change denier can come out and say, proudly, “Bangladesh will be submerged, millions will suffer as a result of anthropogenic climate change, but we must still preserve our carbon-based way of life, no matter what the cost.” Nor are anti-vaxxers ready to argue that, even though vaccines do not cause autism, the death of children from preventable diseases is a regrettable necessity if we are to be released from the clutches of Big Pharma. [...]

It is hard to tell whether global warming denialists are secretly longing for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, are simply indifferent to it, or would desperately like it not to be the case but are overwhelmed with the desire to keep things as they are. It is hard to tell whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide, or want to keep a pristine image of the goodness of the Nazis and the evil of the Jews. It is hard to tell whether an Aids denialist who works to prevent Africans from having access to anti-retrovirals is getting a kick out of their power over life and death, or is on a mission to save them from the evils of the west.

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Quartz: A plan for the free movement of Africans across the continent is being held up by fears of xenophobia

The free movement of Africans between African countries could unquestionably facilitate growth. Allowing freer movement would encourage trade, tourism and investment between African countries. And it would allow students to study in other African countries and Africans with suitable skills to find rewarding jobs. [...]

But there are major obstacles that need to be cleared before the ambition of free movement across the continent can be achieved. The biggest is posed by concerns raised by the continent’s major economies like South Africa and countries in North Africa where unemployment rates are high and there are fears that increased immigration could contribute to increasing domestic tensions.

There are also concerns that if not well managed the free movement could worsen brain drain for poorer countries. Because of these concerns, among others, only 30 countries have signed the protocol. This is much lower than the 44 that have signed the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. [...]

A stronger African coordination around population registration, leading ultimately to an African ID or an African standard ID would be a neat way to address these technical issues. The technical committee could focus first on the obstacles to implementing Phase 1. Once that hurdle is crossed it could move on to Phase 2, and eventually to Phase 3.

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The Atlantic: Barack Obama Still Doesn’t Understand Donald Trump

Obama offered his trademark: a hopeful series of solutions. He encouraged “an inclusive market-based system,” criticizing both “unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism,” and socialism. He emphasized the role of youth, and the need for free speech and open democracies. He also chided opponents of white-nationalist regimes across the world. Taking familiar jabs at identity politics, the former president said that liberals can’t beat their opponents if they dismiss them out of concern that “because they’re white, or because they’re male, that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling—that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”   [...]

His prescription for the world’s economic state, which continues to see a robust recovery from the last recession, didn’t address why even in that recovery the forces of populism and racism still appear to be on the advance. It was flawed given the setting, too. His praise of a global, liberal, market-based economic framework is an incomplete take on the life and philosophy of Mandela, who led a Marxist party that might now be best described as social democratic, and whose major postapartheid challenge was unlocking the vast reserves of wealth held by a minority elite. Obama’s recommendations were in conflict with the words of Madiba himself, who said in a 1996 address: “We need to exert ourselves that much more, and break out of the vicious cycle of dependence imposed on us by the financially powerful: those in command of immense market power and those who dare to fashion the world in their own image.” [...]

In speeches like these, Obama often tries to play the role of a moderator attempting to set the terms of debate so that sides can reach each other in good faith. But this is a romantic view, and it does nothing to counter the obvious disregard Trumpism has for dialogue, mutual empathy, or facts. Nor is it supported by the real histories of freedom, struggle, and movement in both South Africa and the United States. South Africa’s black people overthrew their oppressors, and while careful debate was certainly a critical part of the process, so were shame, dispossession, and outright violence. Indeed, Mandela himself helped lead an armed sabotage campaign against the Afrikaner government, and later refused to pledge to renounce violence in order to secure an early release from prison.

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Haaretz: Only a Conditional Boycott of Israel Will Lead to Change

There are also Israeli organizations fighting tooth and nail to create an alternative to the conversation and practices that prevail at the top – an alternative that favors Israeli-Arab coexistence, humanistic education, human rights in the territories, exposing the injustices of the occupation, and providing legal assistance to Palestinians. The left’s galaxy of idle chatter is also studded with groups of authors, intellectuals and academics who believe they have the power to come up with a magic formula that will convince hundreds of thousands of people to flock to the polls on Election Day with the correct ballot in their hands. [...]

It’s worth studying a few lessons from the battle against apartheid in South Africa. Few people remember that the boycott movement there actually began as a domestic effort by the African National Congress in 1952. Its model was the effort by India’s Congress Party in the ‘30s, which called for a consumer boycott that undermined Britain’s economic interests such as its monopoly on salt production. In other words, long before there was an external boycott, a boycott was organized within South Africa by opponents of the regime. [...]

Awareness of the situation in South Africa began filtering into the West, and especially the United States, after human rights activists realized there was a connection between, say, the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama – which was ignited by Rosa Parks in December 1955 – and the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in March 1960 in which police killed 69 black demonstrators. But liberal groups worldwide haven’t yet made the connection between their war on xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism in their own countries and, for example, the war crime Israel committed when it slaughtered more than 120 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. [...]

In Israel, its base must be Jewish liberals and leftists and Arabs. The Israeli left must understand that the only hope – albeit a small one – to change Israel’s direction lies in creating a full alliance with the Arab minority. After that, the left must also try to add other spurned groups to this coalition of minorities.

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Quartz: Africa’s quiet LGBT revolution

It is routine. And sometimes borders on the absurd. As Kingsford Sumana Bagbin, the deputy speaker of the Ghanaian parliament did when he recently claimed homosexuality is worse than an atomic bomb. [...]

In South Africa, they may have laws protecting all—and legalizing same-sex marriage—citizens but still some want to silence anything perceived as gay. Earlier this year when the acclaimed South African film Inxeba (The Wound) was released, local censors fought to keep it out of movie theaters. The film tackles Xhosa manhood rites and is a tender love story that depicts wonderfully complex African men on screen.

It was controversial because it displays homosexual love in a heterosexual, hyper-masculine rural mountainside setting. I beamed with pride when this film—shortlisted for an Academy Award, and the first South African film to stream on Netflix—was allowed back in regular theaters, after the courts sided with the filmmakers’ legal challenge. [...]

In Tanzania, the brutal onslaught by the government continues as they bully prominent activist—even as it impacts their own society’s health needs, particularly around HIV/AIDS.

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Al Jazeera: Gaza is Soweto revisited

ut, hear this: This column isn't a "rant". It's the truth. And, like me, countless people, in countless places, aren't going to be polite or agreeable any longer to describe - using blunt, simple language, rather than jargon-laced, diplomatic embroidery - the truth about how Israel has turned Gaza into Soweto - while Israel has become South Africa - circa 1976.

Countless people, in countless places, remember when South African policemen - turned willing executioners in service of a dying apartheid regime - shot and killed scores of unarmed black students who marched defiantly in defence of their freedom, dignity and land on June 16, 1976.

Countless people in countless places watched as Israeli soldiers - turned willing executioners in service of another doomed apartheid regime - shot and killed 17 unarmed Palestinians who marched defiantly in defence of their freedom, dignity and land on March 30, 2018. [...]

We're angry because, on cue, the same servile establishment media, quoting the same Israeli officials, regurgitates the same lies that thousands of unarmed Palestinians are simply "human shields" for Hamas and have, in effect, invited their own deaths.

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Quartz: Europe’s black population has increased by at least a million over the last decade

There were nearly one million asylum applicants from sub-Saharan Africa in Europe between 2010 and 2017, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from Eurostat. While Pew Research Center isn’t able to speculate whether the inflow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa will rise at the same pace in the coming years, a separate 2017 Pew Research Center survey conducted in six sub-Saharan countries found that many respondents said they would migrate to another country if they had the chance.

Sub-Saharan migrants in Europe arrive from a diverse set of origins. More than half of migrants who sought asylum in Europe in 2017 were born in Nigeria, South Africa, Somalia, Senegal, Ghana, Angola, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cameroon. Pew Research Center notes that the total number of Somali migrants in Europe increased by 80,000 people between 2010 and 2017. Over the same period, the total population of Eritreans living in Europe increased by about 40,000. [...]

It’s difficult to quantify the overall black population in Europe, simply because many European countries refuse to collect racial data on their citizens. Instead, some European countries collect data on the country of origin of its migrant population and the number of citizens who are children of migrants. With a pan-European black identity starting to emerge in recent years, there are calls for the EU to begin collecting racial data.

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Jacobin Magazine: From Zuma to Ramaphosa

Yet perhaps what Zuma will be remembered for most is the Marikana massacre. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, thirty-four miners in the northwest city. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that ANC politicians (including Ramaphosa) had pressured the police to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not a tragic accident, but a premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board, Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” His conclusion: “there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” [...]

It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old-style warlords. Violence became inseparable from politics, especially in Zuma’s home province of Kwazulu-Natal. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least thirty-five people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted eighty of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, eighty-nine people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in acts of political violence. Almost no arrests have been made. [...]

Zuma’s regime was rife with instability. He regularly hired and fired ministers (he averaged one finance minister per year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair. He governed in a highly personalized manner, simultaneously speaking about his reign as if he was an outside observer and using his power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests or those of his vast family, or of the Guptas. Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency — such as Blade Nzimande, former general secretary of the Communist Party, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand — would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies. [...]

What Ramaphosa represents at one level is a return to the classic ANC model of social compact, putting forward a collective vision that favors developmental capitalism, collective aspiration, social harmony — but by and for elites, at the expense of workers. Indeed, while COSATU and the SACP supported Ramaphosa’s campaign, Zuma broke the back of these once proud organizations and Ramaphosa will most likely be able to pass pro-business policy without facing any real opposition from the Left.

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Quartz: A gay love story set in South Africa’s secretive male traditional initiation has sparked outrage

The film’s weekend release on Feb. 2 in cinemas around the country led to protests and some cinemas pulling the film after staff members were threatened. The producers persevered, with no major incidents taking place, except for the public debate on masculinity, cultural appropriation and the lengths communities have to go to protect their traditions.

The knee-jerk response to the film, the first South African film available on Netflix, is mostly linked to media coverage describing it as a gay love story among initiates, but the film is much more than that. The film’s producers argue that anyone who actually sees it and engages with its subject matter would immediately understand this. It follows the story of Xolani, played by musician and author Nakhane Touré, a lonely factory worker who also acts as a caregiver to initiates while they are isolated from society in the bush. [...]

Critics argue that the film threatens to reveal the secrets of ulwaluko, Xhosa initiation rituals that are purposely shrouded in mystery. Each year, thousands of South African boys undergo circumcision as a rite of passage across several different cultures.

The age-old practice has come under modern scrutiny for initiate deaths at the hands of unscrupulous practitioners. While there have been attempts to regulate the practices, and modernize the tools and aftercare used, the vast majority of South Africans know few details of what goes on in the mountain. Most proponents of initiation believe that’s exactly how it should stay.

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The New York Review of Books: Confederation: The One Possible Israel-Palestine Solution

Colonial Zionist pioneers, in contrast, harmed native Palestinians by working toward Jewish cultural and economic self-sufficiency, and thus the methodical displacement of the Palestinian peasantry—which is why, at least since the Peel Commission in 1937, an arrangement like “partition” could be entertained. The Israeli occupation may be, in its own way, as cruel as apartheid. But comparable cruelty does not necessarily entail a similar political architecture. (I suspect Erekat knows this, but was hoping to shake Israelis out of their complacency.) [...]

This point needs emphasis because rash talk about one state has been obscuring it. Palestinian youth have told Shikaki of their growing interest in pursuing full civil rights in a single state, but this is really a sign of gloom and no small measure of spite—“the conviction that extremists run Israel, and a certain alienation from the corruptions of the Palestinian Authority,” Shikaki told me. His latest polling, conducted at the time of Trump’s Jerusalem statement, shows a depressing spike in the number of young Palestinians preferring “armed struggle” over the status quo—though they know that Israel, a nuclear state, cannot be invaded and destroyed by regional neighbors, and have witnessed the horrors of civil war in Syria. Israelis, for their part, may indeed be complacent regarding the status quo, but most understand that—even if the occupation can be walled off—violent polarization means that their children and grandchildren will be patrolling hostile streets, while over a fifth of their own citizens, Arab citizens, grow inflamed on their side of the wall. [...]

Indeed, if self-determination means national autonomy in security matters, it is a recipe for disintegration. Israeli and Palestinian governments would be seen, respectively, as accountable for the actions of people acting from their territories—“You’re sovereign, so you’re responsible.” They would make themselves hostage to extremists. Any sustainable solution would entail security cooperation—conspicuous security cooperation—making plain the two states’ reciprocal responsibility for the entire environment. The failure to prevent a terrorist atrocity, which will almost certainly come, must be seen as a joint failure, not one side’s bloody-minded effort to gain advantage over the other.   [...]

We hear much, in this context, about Jewish extremists, the settlers, as much for their encroachments on Israeli democracy as on Palestinian farmers. Many of them see themselves as a messianic vanguard and pour salt on longstanding Palestinian wounds. Grotesquely, they rally much of West Jerusalem to theocracy and treat Arab neighbors with contempt. (There are, as I have argued elsewhere, sound reasons to subject the settlements to an international boycott.) But settlers have also worked to interrupt Palestinian “territorial contiguity,” and so, presumably, to foil independent Palestinian economic prospects (the Likud rank-and-file recently voted to annex much of Area C, the roughly 62 percent of the West Bank where the settlements are, and which, owing to Oslo, was left under exclusive Israeli control). To assume they are succeeding in that mission is to attribute too much power to the settlers. We are no longer living in the period of the 1948-9 war, when about a million people on each side fought for hilltops to control the agricultural land in the valleys.

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