Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian
Ayesha Omar

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Ayesha Omar

Wounded people lie in the street on March 21, 1960 in Sharpeville, where security forces massacred 67 protesters. In 1960, police shot 69 black people in the Sharpeville township, south of Johannesburg, during a protest against pass laws, which restricted black people’s movement. (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

Gaza’s humanitarian aid massacre through the lens of Sharpeville

This human rights month, Ayesha Omar recounts what lessons the world can learn from the Sharpeville massacre of 1960

Nelson Mandela votes at a small station on April 28, 1994 outside Durban, Natal during the historic democratic election on February 28, 1994 in South Africa. (Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/ Liaison Agency)

Mandela was not alone when he made his first vote

He recalled the names of the people who went before him, laying the foundation for a democratic South Africa

It was the prospect of power sharing between barely reconciled ideological and moral enemies that confounded the people. (Photo  Louise Gubb/CORBIS SABA/Corbis via Getty Images)

Mandela and De Klerk: South Africa’s first election debate

Ten days before the first democratic election the extraordinary occurred when the leader of the liberation movement and that of the apartheid National Party sat down to talk

Former president Nelson Mandela holds a speech during a rally in Soweto on February 13, 1990 in Johannesburg, South Africa.  (Photo by Georges De Keerle/Getty Images)

Tasks Mandela set remain unfinished business

It is 30 years since Nelson Mandela gave his inaugural address that spoke of oppression in the past and hope for the future

A demolished six-storey building in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood contains libraries, youth centres, training for university students, and a mosque that was bombed by Israeli aircraft in raids in Gaza City, Gaza, on May 18, 2021. (Photo by Momen Faiz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Israel’s destruction of archives, libraries strip Gazans of their past

The anti-apartheid archives provide an understanding of our past and therefore present, something Palestinians no longer have

(John McCann/M&G)

South Africa and Palestine through Mamdani’s prism of decolonisation

The political theorist suggests that the dismantling of apartheid South Africa is a useful example for finding a solution for Palestine

In 1979, 25 years after the anti-colonial conference in Indonesia, OR Tambo recalled the ‘spirit of Bandung’ when he called for the freedom of South Africans and Palestinians.  (Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

ICJ case echoes Tambo’s liberation plea for Palestine

In 1979, 25 years after the anti-colonial conference in Indonesia, the ANC leader recalled the ‘spirit of Bandung’ when he called for the freedom of South Africans and Palestinians

(John McCann/M&G)

South Africa has a political ‘crisis of ideas’

For the country to renew itself it needs to interrogate its intellectual history and context to find solutions to the contemporary democratic politics