Mahmood Mamdani, the executive director of Makerere Institute of Social Research, is not an angel. And certainly the programme is not his fiefdom. MISR’s current mission  takes seriously Frantz Fanon’s resolute plea to the African revolutionary intellectual to not simply revert to our world of yore - the pre-colonial, pre-modern, primordial, etc. - but to rethink it anew.

 The international community must ban the import of all goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements and put an end to the multimillion dollar profits that have fuelled mass human rights violations against Palestinians, said Amnesty International today. 

The objective of the special issue is to examine the discourses of national, inclusive and equitable transformation as opposed to a mere exercise of power transfer between political elites.

South Africa’s democracy is in trouble. The present situation is, in objective terms, a house divided; a house that is tottering on rotten foundations. Despite the more general advances that have been made under the ANC’s rule since 1994, power has not only remained in the hands of a small minority but has increasingly been exercised in service to capital.