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Showing posts from July, 2014

Ruth First, anti-apartheid activist

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On the afternoon of August 17, 1982 Ruth First was killed when a letter bomb exploded as she was going through her mail in her office at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. She had been forced to leave South Africa in 1964 because of her political activism and after first going into exile in England she had taken up a post as Director of Research at the university in Maputo. In her book  117 Days  (1965), Ruth First describes her experiences in solitary confinement in a South African jail. The book’s final sentence, in which she writes about her eventual release, was to prove horrifyingly prophetic: “When they left me in my own house at last, I was convinced that they would come again.” Indeed the security police did “come again”—this time in the form of a bomb secreted in an envelope stolen five years previously from the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Swaziland. Ruth First was born on May 4, 1925 in Johannesburg, South

Still Fighting Apartheid – South African Activist Dennis Brutus

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by  Robert Looby   Monday, August 1st, 2005 Denis Brutus,  (28 November 1924 – 26 December 2009)   born in 1924 in what was then British Rhodesia to South African parents, shot to prominence (and jail) in the 1960s campaigning for a boycott of South Africa in the sporting world. A veteran activist, poet and Professor of African Studies and African Literature, Brutus continues to campaign vigorously against economic injustice. His targets today are the corporations, banks and institutions that profit from what he terms a “global system of economic apartheid”. Robert Looby recently had the pleasure of discussing the past, present and future with Prof. Brutus How did you get involved in the struggle for justice? I grew up in a segregated area of course. I'm classified as a non-white or a coloured, so one is exposed to racial segregation very early, and remember this is the twenties and the thirties when I grew up. But I always make the point that within a community one is pr

14 Historical 'Facts' That Are Completely False

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1. Jewish slaves didn't build the pyramids. This popular myth reportedly stems from comments made by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin when visiting Egypt in 1977, according to Amihai Mazar, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . "No Jews built the pyramids because Jews didn't exist at the period when the pyramids were built," Mazar told the AP. Recent archaeological finds actually show that Egyptians built the pyramids themselves. "The myth of the slaves building pyramids is only the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood," Dieter Wildung, a former director of Berlin's Egyptian Museum, told the AP. "The world simply could not believe the pyramids were build without oppression and forced labor, but out of loyalty to the pharaohs." 2. Cleopatra wasn't Egyptian. Cleopatra belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty , a family of Greek origin that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. Her family actually refused to speak