Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
Analysis and Action on Policies Impacting Africa

South Africa: Political Liberation, Economic Capitulation

By Khadija Sharife | April 2009

Its that time of year again: shiny posters pasted to lampposts (beckoning people toward the light?); politicians pole dancing for votes, faces (and hands) scrubbed clean of deception; the largely uninformed and inactive flesh-and-blood electorate prying open ‘magic-voting-button’ boxes to retrieve dusty, moth bitten cloaks of idealism, stapled with old newspaper cuttings and dented dreams (its a little banged up, but now is your time!). But the duct tape is coming loose; the dream, unraveling - and this, far from the madding crowd - those swept up in the heady sensationalised narrative of the Mbeki-Zuma drama, fatally reducing the inherited and endorsed economic legacy of apartheid (and often contradictory internal dynamics) to a leadership clash between two pack leaders vying for the alpha or first male’s throne (seated atop the same system, so does it really make a difference?).

The nuclear chain of command: South Africa and the Bomb

By Khadija Sharife | April 2009

The crash of the Berlin Wall — stripping the apartheid government of the primary pretext sustaining apartheid — and implicit US support, would see Prime Minister de Klerk dismantling the regime’s nuclear programme, employing Dr Wynand Mouton, then-rector of the University of the Free State and retired nuclear physicist, to destroy the body of evidence related to the nuclear programme. No amnesty was required for the estimated 1000 specialists involved in the industry.