Latest news with #NelsonMandelaFoundation
Eyewitness News
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Eyewitness News
Nelson Mandela Foundation rejects claims it failed to defend SA against Trump's false genocide claims
Alpha Ramushwana 26 May 2025 | 15:52 Nelson Mandela Foundation Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) Julius Malema President Ramaphosa was in Washington D.C. in the United States of America on 21 May 2025 for a working visit at the invitation of US President Donald Trump. Picture: Elmond Jiyane/GCIS JOHANNESBURG - The Nelson Mandela Foundation has rejected claims that it had failed to defend South Africa against false statements of a genocide on white Afrikaner farmers in the country by US President Donald Trump. This was in response to remarks made by Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema last week, accusing the foundation of keeping mum amid escalating tensions with the US. Trump's assertion that a "white genocide" is underway in South Africa has sparked outrage, with the EFF calling on prominent organisations to take a stand against the false narrative. ALSO READ: • Malema slams Ramaphosa for painting SA as a crime hub during US visit • EFF reiterates its opposition to proposed changes to allow Starlink to operate in SA • Trump, Ramaphosa engagement proof EFF remains 'major political force', says Malema • EFF dismisses Ramaphosa, Trump engagement as meeting of white privileged men • EFF disappointed with Ramaphosa for not defending SA's courts in Trump meeting During an EFF march last week, Malema criticised the Nelson Mandela Foundation, accusing it of failing to take action and condemning Trump's claims. However, the foundation has unequivocally refuted the allegations, labelling them untrue. The foundation emphasised that its CEO, Dr. Mbongiseni Buthelezi, publicly addressed the frosty relations between Pretoria and Washington. It also added that it had been actively engaged in closed-door discussions with political leaders and academics to navigate the complex diplomatic challenges. The Nelson Mandela Foundation has firmly dismissed the EFF's accusations, reiterating that it had not remained silent on the strained diplomatic ties.
IOL News
23-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
The Legacy of Gertrude Shope: A Tribute to a Fearless Leader and Patriot
Struggle stalwart and former president of the ANC Women's League, Gertrude Shope. We are rightly a nation in mourning and justifiably feel a sense of deep loss and grief. Her selfless dedication and commitment inspired many of us young and old alike, says the writer. Image: Nelson Mandela Foundation Ambassador Welile Nhlapo When my mother passed on in 1973 I learnt about the pain of losing a mother and hoped it was my last experience. Today I feel the same pain with the passing of Mme Gertrude Shope, Isithwalandwe. She treated me as her child and showed me the love of a mother. She was my leader and mentor at the same time. Her late husband, Mark Shope, was equally my father and political mentor. He groomed me to be a political instructor in our camp in Angola and recruited me to the underground structures of the SACP. The Shopes were the in-laws of my childhood friend and Comrade, the late Tebogo Mafole. We all shared a strong bond of comradeship and selfless service to our people. Many others have experienced the same warmth, parental love, and political mentorship I am writing about. It particularly gives me a deep sigh of relief to be personal about what is going through my mind. Last week, her daughter, Lyndall, shared a video of her asking about me in a conversation they had. That is what a mother would do in her period of final reflection. I deeply understand why it happened and feel very overwhelmed that she thought about me. We are rightly a nation in mourning and justifiably feel a sense of deep loss and grief. Her selfless dedication and commitment inspired many of us young and old alike. There is no aspect of our struggle in which she did not leave a mark and a legacy to be emulated. Her life and deeds constitute many lessons of what patriotism and internationalism truly mean. Her commitment to global peace and security continued to be celebrated in the Annual Gertrude Shope Lecture on Women in Peace and Security as part of a dedicated continental training programme for women peace mediators conducted annually at DIRCO. I feel proud and honoured to be part of this noble experience. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad Loading She did not only believe in the importance of intergenerational mix but was an embodiment of its true meaning. The ANC Women's and Youth Sections shared the same floor in Lusaka, Zambia and both of us were Heads of the two sections. We had the common responsibility of dealing with the challenges facing Youth and Women in the ANC. I learnt a lot from her on how to tackle our common tasks. We consulted on many issues and sought to find a unified approach towards uniting and giving common purpose to particularly the youth in institutions of higher learning wherever they were provided with scholarships, young women and men in Umkhonto we Sizwe and those deployed in various projects and offices. That is what the logo and slogan, Fight, Learn, and Produce found expression and adopted also as the current emblem of the ANC Youth League. This task remains firmly on the agenda in dealing with our contemporary issues of leadership, gender parity and confronting all forms of violence against women and children. A lot will still be written and spoken about as tributes continue to flow during this period of mourning. Our mother and leader have left us in pain and grief. We find solace that through her exemplary life and teachings, she left us with the best Inheritance we can yearn for and cherish as a nation she leaves behind. We bow our heads in her honour as we express our sincere condolences and gratitude to her entire family for the treasured gift of a wonderful soul. May she rest in eternal peace till we meet again. The struggle continues!!! * Welile Nhlapo is South Africa's former Ambassador to Ethiopia, Burundi and the USA. He was also the National Security Adviser to the President of South Africa and is a Struggle Veteran. ** The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.
Daily Maverick
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Beyond the lens: The normalisation of horror in Sudanese war imagery
In continuance of the reflection on my career in the media, which I referred to in my last column, I look here at the way that photography, especially 'war photography', brings the sheer horror, cruelty and savage killings to the screens of our computers and smartphones. I look, in this column, at the way that images, or 'the visual', has become political as Rod Stoneman of the University of Galway suggested with his book, Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual. I have been going through pictures of the conflict that has ravaged communities and societies in Sudan since 2023. It brought home to me the way in which the Sudanese conflict has become normalised, how it has dissolved into the background of world affairs. It also brought home how we have come to rely on photographs and photography to get a sense of the horrors of war, and what my old friend James Sey referred to (with reference to a picture I made 40 years ago) as ' forms of sudden death '. To be clear, never mind the self-referencing, I have always been a middling reporter and a below-average photographer. Whatever I may or may not have achieved as a photojournalist was by accident. The slideshow on the website of the Nelson Mandela Foundation carries one or two pictures I made during the 1980s. One aspect of photography (in our age) that cannot be ignored is the way that photography, like journalism — now more 'democratic' because anyone and everyone can do it — has become commodified, twisted and perverted. 'Instagrammable places' And how photography, in particular, has become terribly middle-brow with ' Instagrammable places ', cringy pouting or duck-lip selfies, and much like the 19th century, photography 'made the visual world (and private lives) collectible… in the photographic album' then and through the smartphone, today. One exemplar of this 19th century capture of private lives is the collection of Victor Hugo, the French Romantic author and poet, who, with the collaboration of his wife, Adele, assembled 41 photographs made between 1852 and 1854 and offered the collection as a gift to Mademoisele Euphémie Barbier of the family in whose house Hugo and his family had been hosted during their exile in Jersey between 1851 and 1857. The point, here, is that the physical photo album has disappeared almost completely, and photographs are now 'stored' on smartphones, tablets and computers — a long way from the burgundy morocco-leather binding and gilt embellishments of the Hugo collection of 1854. Journalism, the text and image, has been democratised, as it were. Both have been 'set free', and the thing about freedom is that you can't reel it back in — freedom will run away from what kept it shackled. What has changed in terms of the practicality of photography (when comparing say news or social documentary photography with the Instagrammers) is that for the most part, making pictures starts with a story that is then followed by the image. It's not all happenstance, though it can be… One of my favourite photographers, the late Ara Güler, aka 'Istanbul's Eye', who probably remains the greatest Turkish news and social documentary photographer, explained this in the following way with a reflection on being assigned a task: ' I look for the photograph that is in my mind's eye. The story comes before the photograph. As I know what the end product should be, I say, 'Bull's eye?' when I find it. Of course, I can't say, 'that's absolutely it', so I take several shots to be sure. The shot I'm looking for comes out in the processing.' While I agree with him, in general — I always leave room for irrationalities, and sometimes your 'mind's eye' sees things that you never imagined as part of the assignment — seeing, knowing in your mind what you want, or how you want to capture what is before you, is a lot different from the incessant snapping of Instagrammable scenes or selfies that have no social or any other meaningful purpose. While I may appear to be dismissive of the Instagrammers (I, too, am one of them) it should be clear that democratising everything with social media (journalism and photography), setting everything free, is just that, and it becomes difficult to reel freedom back in. War in photography, images and paintings It is war photography, and images of the conflict in Sudan, that is the main topic of discussion here. I have, admittedly, wasted much too much time on only somewhat related issues. That is the nature of the act of writing… The conflict in Sudan has been raging since 2023. It has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced more than 11 million people from their homes. The UN has described it as 'one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history', the Guardian has reported. The closest we can get to the horror, those of us who are sat hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from the violence, is through photographs. As Stoneman explained, 'we cannot avoid the image of cruelty. Pornography and atrocity both lead to degrees of disturbance on the part of the viewer, representations of violence which annul thinking. The focus is always on what can be done to the body of another: how it can be broken and destroyed…. All power inescapably contains violence.' Researchers at Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab examined satellite images (and thermal sensing data) captured from the skies above Darfur in Sudan, and which illustrate the ways in which the conflict in that part of Africa caused mass death and destruction. War is, after all, about killing and breaking things. They wrote in the 28 February 2025 edition of the journal Science that: ' Where a hospital stood just a few weeks ago, there may only be scarred ruins today. A graveyard on the edge of a town has undergone a sudden expansion. Entire villages have been torched.' We always come back, then, to the imagery of war, whether through photography or painting. As with most of the interpretations of war, our reflections depend on our class standing, national pride, or racial prejudices and biases. We make of imagery what we want The outstanding problem to those of us who look at the images of war in Sudan, is that it has become normalised. This normalisation has nothing to do with war in Africa 'because Africans cannot live together in peace'. That glosses over, or conveniently ignores, the carnage of Europe's 100 years' war between 1337 and 1453, the estimated 40 million people killed during World War 1, and the 70-85 million people killed in Europe between 1939 and 1945 (about 3% of the world's population!). We haven't yet factored in the wars that led to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, or the war between Russia and Ukraine. So, before we conjure images or imaginaries about 'Africans who cannot live together in peace and harmony', we may want to go back to the image, and look at Paul Nash's The Ypres Salient at Night, or any of his other images of the death and destruction of war in Europe, for that matter. Any one of those European wars, and any other war, is viewed through lenses of national identity, class analysis, discomfort, or it is relegated to the past. As one commentator said about the likelihood that Albert Luthuli may have been killed by apartheid agents: 'The man died 58 years ago and if he was murdered the perpetrators are also long dead. We need to concentrate on the living!' This wilful obfuscation reminds us of what Stoneman suggested: that the visuals of war are political. Our responses to the imagery (or who the killers are/were) becomes, then, political. Taking the commentator at his/her word… we are back to the line we draw under things that sit uncomfortably. Which wars or injustices should we remember? When or what is the starting point for 'moving on'? Whose death means more or less? Photographs and images remind us of the cruelty, the savagery and violence and destruction of war. We choose to forget, or ignore wars, or are disinterested in wars (war remains interested in us!), and photographs and paintings, the image, bring wars to our desktops and into our lives. Faced, then, with images of 'war and of waste… (we) turn right over to the TV page' — as the words to the song go. Sheer horror We may not go through the pain and suffering that the people of Sudan experience every second of every day. We can only imagine, when we look at the photographs and imagery, the sheer horror. The images we see of Sudan should make us uncomfortable, but they clearly do not. A lesson about the US war in Vietnam remains with me. The woman who (still) remains the finest thinker on photography and war, the late Susan Sontag, made us think whether anyone's life was worth preserving — as much as the life of a US soldier. Mark Twain reminded us, long before that, that there was an extraordinary cultural chauvinism at work that was both existential and ideological, and in terms of which the lives of 'others' were really meaningless, and not worth saving, or even considering (probably because 'the perpetrators are also long dead. We need to concentrate on the living') if it means we have someone who has to take responsibility. To the families and friends of people who continue to be killed in Sudan, the memories may fade, but the photographs will remain. DM
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'Visionary' South African businessman Douw Steyn dies
South African billionaire and businessman Douw Steyn, who founded the BGL Insurance Group and was a good friend of late South African statesman Nelson Mandela, has died aged 77. Steyn, known for his global success in the insurance industry, died on Tuesday following a long period of illness. He was regarded in South Africa as a "visionary" with a "larger than life character". Steyn first befriend Mandela shortly after the former president was released from his decades-long imprisonment on Robben Island. Steyn's death was confirmed by Steyn City Properties, the company behind the luxury estate he developed around 2010. The company said Steyn would be "remembered as an exceptional entrepreneur who built a global business of immense scale across seven countries. The Nelson Mandela Foundation said it mourned the death of "someone Madiba [Mandela] regarded as a friend". "He [Steyn] supported Madiba in numerous ways over many years. During 1992 Madiba lived in [Steyn's] home as he navigated his way through a very painful separation from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela." South Africa's first democratically elected president also "frequently turned to" Steyn "when he needed spaces for retreat or support for his projects", according to the foundation. Mandela spent 27 years in prison for campaigning to end white-minority rule. Eighteen of those years were spent on Robben Island, an island off Cape Town. Steyn began his entrepreneurial journey in 1975 when he founded Steyn's Insurance Brokers, according to South African daily business website BusinessLIVE. This would pave the way for the establishment of one of the country's leading groups, Auto & General, and later BGL Insurance in the UK in the 90s. He also established the Steyn Foundation, which is aimed at supporting its impoverished townships. He leaves behind his wife and three children. Soweto's 'Lion King' on his return for Mufasa Top South African singer Winnie Khumalo dies aged 51 Go to for more news from the African continent. Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica Africa Daily Focus on Africa
BBC News
05-02-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Douw Steyn: South African businessman and Steyn City founder dies
South African billionaire and businessman Douw Steyn, who founded the BGL Insurance Group and was a good friend of late South African statesman Nelson Mandela, has died aged known for his global success in the insurance industry, died on Tuesday following a long period of was regarded in South Africa as a "visionary" with a "larger than life character".Steyn first befriend Mandela shortly after the former president was released from his decades-long imprisonment on Robben Island. Steyn's death was confirmed by Steyn City Properties, the company behind the luxury estate he developed around company said Steyn would be "remembered as an exceptional entrepreneur who built a global business of immense scale across seven Nelson Mandela Foundation said it mourned the death of "someone Madiba [Mandela] regarded as a friend". "He [Steyn] supported Madiba in numerous ways over many years. During 1992 Madiba lived in [Steyn's] home as he navigated his way through a very painful separation from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela."South Africa's first democratically elected president also "frequently turned to" Steyn "when he needed spaces for retreat or support for his projects", according to the spent 27 years in prison for campaigning to end white-minority of those years were spent on Robben Island, an island off Cape began his entrepreneurial journey in 1975 when he founded Steyn's Insurance Brokers, according to South African daily business website would pave the way for the establishment of one of the country's leading groups, Auto & General, and later BGL Insurance in the UK in the 90s. He also established the Steyn Foundation, which is aimed at supporting its impoverished leaves behind his wife and three children. You may also be interested in: Soweto's 'Lion King' on his return for MufasaTop South African singer Winnie Khumalo dies aged 51 Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
