Original essays on political economy, historical memory, governance reform, and the social contract. Published here first. Extracts distributed on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.
Hendrik Verwoerd was born 125 years ago this month. Dr Malusi Gigaba on what he believed, what he wrote into law and into the classroom, and why so much of his design is still with us.
Steve Biko died, and Amílcar Cabral was born, on 12 September. Dr Malusi Gigaba on the clinics, funds and coalition they built, and why a service that worked was their strongest argument.
Eighty-two years ago today the ANC Youth League held its founding congress at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. Dr Malusi Gigaba on what its founders did that is almost never remarked upon — they wrote a constitution that bound them, gave conference the sole power to elect and remove them, and settled in advance that the League answered to Congress — and on what those rules ask of the League now.
Nokuthula Simelane was twenty-three when the Security Branch took her from the basement of the Carlton Centre in September 1983. Her body has never been found, no applicant ever asked the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty for her killing, and in forty-three years her family has been to court three times to make the state act. Dr Malusi Gigaba and Minister Sis Thembisile Simelane, her sister, on a file that is still open.
Duma Khumalo was sentenced to death for a killing the highest court in the land assumed none of the six had caused. He was reprieved fifteen hours before the rope, released in 1991, and died in 2006 still asking a free South Africa to correct what the apartheid state had written against his name.
Twenty-five years after the World Conference Against Racism convened in Durban, Dr Malusi Gigaba asks what has changed about how inequality is produced — from a digital divide to an ownership divide, and whether Africa is building the capital, computing capacity and institutions to own its digital future, or merely gaining access to systems others control.
Dr Malusi Gigaba set out to write about the marriage of Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu, and could not establish when she was born. From Queen Manthatisi to Charlotte Maxeke to a late-registration rate that ran at 42.5 per cent as recently as 2005 — on the register that failed to record us.