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Keywords: Africa

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Outgrowing apartheid: FW de Klerk

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 23 November 2021
    51 Comments

    The passing of South Africa’s last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, raises pressing questions about a complex historical character who, according to his brother, Willem de Klerk, slowly outgrew apartheid. In a critical sense, he was bound, understandably, by both time and context: race, the need to defend a racial hierarchy, the historical role of a segregationist system that saw his all-white National Party retain power for decades. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Learning from Timor-Leste’s experience for Victoria’s Yoo-rrook commission

    • Pat Walsh
    • 23 March 2021
    4 Comments

    Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a truth-telling inquiry that will investigate injustices committed against Aboriginal Victorians since colonisation, rightly looks to similar models in South Africa and Canada. Each of these also had a clear Indigenous focus and addressed the ravaging impact of white settlement on traditional lands, cultures and communities in their respective countries.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Responding with compassion

    • Najma Sambul
    • 09 July 2020
    12 Comments

    Donations flooded the centre. Volunteers from across Melbourne arrived ready to support any way they could. Key volunteers came from Carlton and surrounding suburbs, mostly young African people were on the frontlines. They had used social media to reach out to friends, relatives and others locked in the housing estates to ask what they needed and then got to work.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A view from Africa of Australia burning

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 14 November 2019
    10 Comments

    As fires obliterated large swathes of Australia, I was largely oblivious to the news — though tenuously connected to events as I travelled through oven-hot, tinder-dry national parks in Southern Africa. It was only when I reached the airport in Johannesburg that the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to me.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    On first reading Boochani on Manus

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 May 2019
    10 Comments

    No Friend But the Mountains deservedly won an Australian prize but was considered ineligible for others because the writer was not Australian. The book itself mocks that exclusion. Boochani's years on Manus Island branded him as Australian in the same way African slaves became American by the brand American owners burned on to them.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    New law old news for Palestinian apartheid

    • Lana Tatour
    • 08 February 2019
    7 Comments

    Any suggestion that Israel is a racist and racial state is often met with outrage and accusations of antisemitism. Yet even supporters of Israel were shocked by the recent legislation of the Nation-State law. The law isn't news, however. Just like the apartheid law in South Africa, it doesn't signify the onset of apartheid; it enshrines it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    White defensiveness in Morrison's Cook gaffe

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 24 January 2019
    13 Comments

    What do Indigenous and Muslim Australians have in common? They are the foil against which normative White Australian identity is contrasted. The latest group to join them are African migrants, subject of a new campaign of fear. Because the stories we tell ourselves can change, one day there might be one that honours all of us.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Now more than ever, the personal is political

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 28 November 2018
    7 Comments

    Witnessing the sense of relief from Australian-African activists at the outcome of the Victorian state election, I was not sure why I had a sense of déjà vu. Then I realised this collective exhale reminded me vividly of the sentiment from the LGBTQ community after the marriage equality survey results were announced.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Alt-right wolves in sheep's clothing

    • Joshua Badge
    • 27 November 2018
    2 Comments

    Far-right extremists are savvy political actors. They know openly discussing their beliefs risks running afoul of anti-discrimination laws. Because of this, they have mastered how to speak in the negative and convey meaning through allusion.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fake news about 'fascist' Queen

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 November 2018
    20 Comments

    Some creative choices see Bohemian Rhapsody veer from fairytale to fake news. Displacing 'Fat Bottomed Girls' allows the filmmakers to write out the exploitative publicity stunt for that song. By skipping The Works tour, they can conveniently ignore how the band flouted the UN's cultural boycott against apartheid era South Africa.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stories that can save your life

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 31 October 2018
    5 Comments

    McGirr's reflection on the callowness of racist attitudes in Australia is deepened by Conrad's novel, which describes a white man's journey into the centre of black Africa to search for an acquaintance. But it also explores the river of exploitation that connects the Nile to the Thames, and situates the heart of darkness in Europe.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Finding myself through First Peoples' stories

    • François Kunc
    • 14 September 2018
    11 Comments

    Place and identity are fundamental for each of us. They are what our First Peoples had taken from them. In thinking about who I am, I have come to the conclusion that without understanding our First Peoples and their story as told by them I really can't understand myself as an Australian.

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