On Saturday, 27 April, South Africa will celebrate Freedom Day, the on which South Africa held its first democratic elections. But the events that unfolded before that monumental day were grim.

Black-and-white pictures were projected onto the wall of a South African classroom and gospel music played evocatively in the background.

The pictures told a chilling tale: Angry protesters. Policemen beating crowds. Corpses lying scattered on the road. Coffins piled up.

Sharpeville Massacre

The date of these events – 21 March 1960 – is etched in the annals of history.

Major Mgxaji, a retired union official in the poor township of Khayelitsha near Cape Town, was repeatedly jailed and tortured by apartheid authorities for his political activism with the ANC in the 1970s and 80s.

“It is not the same party as back then,” the 67-year-old said in an interview in Khayelitsha, where rolling power cuts in recent months have been widely blamed on corruption at the national electricity provider. “The ANC people have developed the struggle of the belly instead of the struggle to better the lives of our people. That is very dangerous.”

The outcome of the 8 May general election is a foregone conclusion. That’s according to some in the Eastern Cape, such as 74-year-old Nofikile Tyhokolwana, who believe that the upcoming vote has long been written in the stars.

An empty, faded powder blue cabinet stands at the far end of Tyhokolwana’s hut in Corhana on the outskirts of Mthatha. Her late husband was a carpenter and made the cabinet when he worked at a now-closed furniture factory in town.

In an orange house along one of the sloped lanes of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’s Muslim neighborhood, 92-year-old Abdiyah Da Costa deftly climbs the stairs to the second floor to what essentially has become a personal museum. Meticulously dressed and made up—she used to own what she describes as four “high-fashion” clothing shops—she’s been waiting to show us around. Outside her window is a view of Cape Town’s iconic, flat-topped Table Mountain, which overlooks the city and the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s cold in the pizza joint. Winter nights in Madagascar are chilly, and the tiny restaurant is in shadow until mid-afternoon. Those who attend Opération Bokiko’s lunchtime meetings are bundled in peacoats, sweaters, and elegantly tied scarves. As each person shows up, they shake the hand of the director, the manager, anyone else who’s already there. They usually start late—on “Malagasy time”—but Michèle Rakotoson is always punctual. No matter that she’s coming from outside the city in a little Citroen 2CV that doesn’t go higher than third gear anymore—she arrives promptly.

1919 was a year of travelling revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa. The uprisings were triggered by the efforts (sometimes secret, sometimes not) of Britain, France, Italy and Spain to colonise the Middle East and to divvy up its territories at the end of the First World War. As their intentions became apparent – after both Britain and France had repeatedly promised otherwise – thousands of men and, for the first time, women took to the streets in protest.

When massive protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 in reaction to the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white policeman Darren Wilson, a duo of archivists were inspired to explore how to preserve social media posts as a means to document history for the ages—and to empower social activists to take control of their own narratives.

Introduction

It is election season, and that means a raft of political polls. One of the mainstays of the South African market research universe is “research giant” Ipsos. It has, since July 2018, already released three such polls. They have included a range of numbers – particularly with regard to DA support – that are deeply problematic, for a wide range of reasons.

Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) president Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi believes that support for his party waned in the last elections because Jacob Zuma was ANC president – a situation which fuelled a rise of Zulu nationalism among IFP supporters, who became convinced that it was their turn to govern the country.

In an interview with City Press on Friday, Buthelezi spoke about how Zuma’s leadership of the ANC affected support for the IFP, saying that Zulus who deserted the IFP for the Zuma-led ANC were now returning to the party.

The United Nations is deploying crime-scene investigators, human rights officers and a child protection expert to central Mali to investigate intercommunal violence over the weekend that killed more than 150 people, one-third of them children.

Spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani of the UN human rights office says the massacre in Ogossagou, in Mali's Mopti region, mostly targeted people from the ethnic Fulani, or Peuhl, community.