Photo: Lihlumelo Toyana
By Rachel Hatcher
[Originally published by teleSUR and the first post in a series titled “Learning and unlearning history in South Africa’s public spaces”]
Students rewriting the history of South Africa on buildings and statues at the University of the Free State is an important act of restorative justice.
In recent years, students in South Africa, Chile, Québec, and elsewhere, have been protesting neoliberal/neocolonial policies, including the outsourcing of workers on campus and significant hikes in tuition fees. In South Africa, protests by mostly Black students against tuition hikes took place under declarations that Fees Must Fall. Yet, students in South Africa are also protesting continued institutional racism, and even white supremacy, on university campuses and the continued colonization of higher education. Indeed, the Fees Must Fall movement is in some ways inspired by and a continuation of the Rhodes Must Fall movement that began in early 2015 and that was successful in demanding the removal of the statue of imperialist, racist, and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. These protests have taken place in the larger context of widespread disappointment that the promise of 1994 has not been realized, that little has changed in South Africa since the apartheid-era ended and the first democratic elections were held, and that what changes have been made have mostly been cosmetic. Racism, especially institutional racism, remains and few structural reforms have been carried out.
At the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein, a traditionally Afrikaner university in a traditionally Afrikaner and very conservative town and province (the Free State), Fees Must Fall protests were muted in 2015, at least in comparison to other universities. In February 2016, however, the workers’ strike against outsourcing and un-liveable, low wages, which many Black students activists participated in in solidarity with the workers, morphed into protests about just those underlying issues that Fees Must Fall was about — institutional racism and a lack of transformation at the university. Continue reading
I am not a parent. Nor am I close to becoming a parent. That being said, one of the things that strikes me as a major challenge of early parenthood – perhaps the first challenge after a child is born – is picking a name. The challenges of finding the right name has long been a sitcom staple. And while it may seem easy to pick a name that 
Judging from recent developments in Canada, Mexico, and the United States it seems we’re on the cusp of a monumental shift in North American drug policy. Indeed, the war on drugs paradigm and its requisite enforcement agencies appear under greater attack than perhaps ever before. This is especially true for marijuana prohibition. In Canada medical marijuana has been widely available for more than a decade, while new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly promised to move toward a system of recreational legalization. In Mexico the Supreme Court recently declared that individuals should have the right to grow and distribute marijuana for personal use, potentially paving the way for legal challenges to the nation’s current drug laws. In the United States nearly half the country now allows medical marijuana, with four states also providing a legal market for recreational marijuana and as many as six more primed to follow this year.