The th!nc Foundation

  Today is December 31, and it marks the end of a calendar year; it defines a time society has agreed to mark twelve monthly periods with which age will be determined. On this day, I would, as a young boy, generally be in Soweto, Central Western Jabavu, 1037, to be exact, at my grandparent's place for a December holiday retreat and away from Pitori. For one reason or another, my granny would have asked my mom if I had come through to help her with her 'business of retailing' fruits and vegetables at Inhlanzane Station. The routine was to wake up every morning at 05:00 and prepare tea with freshly baked cakes, eat that mini early breakfast, take out the stock, put it on a 'rented van', and be dropped at around 06:00 at the station. We would set the table; the first target of customers were men going to Inhlanzane Hostel, coming from their 'march-in-the-line' overnight work. As we had set the table, my granny would be in a mode to go to the Soweto Fresh Produc...

The future of the ANC, once a professed force of the left, is now in jeopardy. Shaped by the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and the West's lack of support, the ANC was compelled to align itself with the left. However, its roots in the African liberal elite would later resurface, leading to a more liberal than leftist trajectory. The achievement of universal franchise in 1994 and the 1996 Constitution's promulgation necessitated a review of all alliances formed during the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle, signalling a need for reconfiguration.  From within, the ANC's professed broad-church character contradicts various ideological orientations. The battle for its ideological soul has intensified since it gained access to state power. Externally, it continues to face mounting pressure from the geopolitical nodes of the West and the East. More acutely, the global, overtly supported by RSA's economic establishment to secure the ANC as the substrate of the ...

As adopted at the Congress of the FUNDERS somewhere in South Africa,    1990   We, the Funders of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who FUND it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the FUNDERS; that the FUNDERS have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on the will of the POOR, thus creating injustice and inequality of influence for the FUNDER class; that our country will never be prosperous or free until all FUNDERS live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights, though competitive, of access to opportunities; that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the FUNDERS, can secure all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief; Therefore, we, the FUNDERS of South Africa, black and white together as equals, countrymen and brothers, adopt this FUNDER Freedom Char...

  As the constitutional order advances and the inherent liberation promises endow our humanity with freedoms, South Africans must embrace the responsibility and obligations to safeguard the democratic order as a guaranteeing firmament. A new epoch began in 1994 when South Africans resolved to recognise the past injustices and establish social and economic justice as the basis upon which respect for human dignity would be the order of the day. Continually, the RSA society faces the cusp of various dimensions of the epoch, but this time, it is about the obligation to live the liberation promise devoid of its tormenting encumbrances.  The thirty-year experience of being a non-racialising, democratising, equality and equity-sensitive, and social cohesion-chasing society has radically transformed the relationship between “we the people” and the democratic order we are threading. At the same time, the developments in the freedom literacy of South Africans and the growing huma...