Terence Corrigan

Will African cities recognise the vital role of informal traders?By the beginning of July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had gripped the world, shutting down much of what had previously been taken for granted. Perhaps more significantly, it had laid a deep sense of trepidation on the world. On the fifth of the month, police raided the Jambanja, Unit L, market in the town of Chitungwiza in Zimbabwe. This had become commonplace: the authorities had instituted lockdown measures that severely restricted activity, and informal traders had been blamed for spreading the disease. The vendors attempted to salvage their stock and evade arrest,…

Countering fake news and disinformation is complicated, the solution elusive Two decades back, a minor story emerged from Khartoum. A mysterious West African man had allegedly been visiting local merchants and offering a friendly handshake that would cause the merchant’s penis to wither. Panic ensued, with warnings passed on by SMS. The disjunct between the message and the medium was glaring. As the commentator Mark Steyn wrote: “The telling detail of the vanishing penis hysteria is that it was spread by text message. You can own a cellphone yet still believe that foreigners are able, with a mere handshake, to cause your…

The ANC took power with the conviction that state power would resolve the country’s socio-economic deficits. Partly, this reflected the statist ideological convictions of a party schooled in the Soviet bloc. It also denoted an attraction to the idea of a “developmental state”, the latter position being a liveable compromise after the failure of the Eastern European socialism it had admired. A strong, interventionist state would make a purposeful developmental contribution to the country’s new political freedom. South Africa was endowed with a portfolio of bodies that had played this role in the past and could be adapted to do so…

“They’re useless, all of them,” hissed Sam (not his real name) across the table. “Messed it up completely.” Sam and I were at a popular Rosebank eatery, catching up after not seeing each other for some years. We’d first met back in the 1990s. He’d come of age in the 1980s, during which time he had been a youthful anti-apartheid activist (he was “coloured”, though vociferously rejected that moniker). He had joined the ANC shortly after its unbanning in 1990. You wouldn’t think so now. His assessment of the state of Gauteng’s cities was laced with venom. He described one municipal employee…

South Africa’s power crisis has become one of the defining features of its present and a window onto its prospects. Both an expression of the deep-seated pathologies afflicting the country and a contributor to them, the failure of Eskom, the state utility company, to supply the needs of the country is a chilling warning of what the future may hold.   For a country in which half of the population is estimated to live in poverty of one degree or another, with a third of the working-age population unemployed and economic performance lethargic for the past 15 years and well…

Elephants are a wonderful metaphor, not least in Africa. The largest land-based animals on earth, they are an unmissable presence in any environment. And so, when something looms large and intrusive – and is perhaps deliberately ignored – it is “the elephant in the room”. Where powerful forces contend for dominance in disregard of those around them, it evokes the comment that “when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers”. Governance in South Africa has come increasingly to resemble that devastated savannah. South Africa is planted over with an array of public institutions – invariably with “developmental” mandates –…

Heritage: the long shadows of past and present Commemorating heritage in Africa is no longer the exclusive province of governments There was an interesting exchange between Thabo Mbeki and Constand Viljoen in the late 1990s. The former was an aristocrat of an African liberation movement who would become South Africa’s president, and the latter was the chief of the country’s apartheid-era defence force, a soldier’s soldier and politician. Both had a keen sense of the manner in which the past echoes into the present. Responding to a rancorous debate on white settlement in the country, Viljoen objected that his forebears…

Religion is a deeply rooted aspect of Africa’s cultural life and there is nothing to suggest that this will change in the foreseeable future There is no disputing the importance of religion to African life. In 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion and Life reported that Africa led the world in religious adherence. Religion played a deep, viscerally important role in people’s day to day lives and in their world view. It was not uncommon for as many as 90% of respondents to report that religion was important to them. Around half of Christians looked forward to the return of…

A controversial proposal to legalise the sale of rhino horn would require radically improved state enforcement to regulate trade and prosecute violations

Even the most promising of Africa’s leaders cannot seem to resist the temptation to extend presidential terms