Simone Scriven is a writer and researcher from South Africa. The Last Words of Rowan du Preez: Murder and Conspiracy on the Cape Flats was published in 2018.
In 2010, graphs that showed wild rhino numbers in South Africa plummeting towards zero began to circulate among conservationists. The animals were being poached at a rate far above replacement level, in a repeat of the crisis that had nearly wiped them out in the 1970s. Similar figures soon appeared for elephant populations in East Africa. In 2016, the Environmental Investigation Agency...
Forests help both to prevent and protect against typhoons, through carbon sequestering, wind buffering and landslide fixing.
President Duterte introduced the Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators model for online casinos in 2016. It wasn’t long before police investigations were linking the POGO industry to kidnapping, drug dealing networks, sex and labour trafficking, largescale money laundering, and the illegal wildlife trade. Seizures of pangolin scales increased ninefold between 2018 and 2020.
On Sunday, 18 April, a small fire on Table Mountain was whipped by high winds into an enormous blaze. It spread quickly to the nearby campus of the University of Cape Town, where embers set alight the roof of the African Studies Library and burned to ashes a significant amount of the world’s rarest and most valuable collections of African media. You could watch it all pretty much live: the family WhatsApp group beaming out the incineration of what you had foolishly believed to be enduring. While the full extent of the damage is still not known, there has been a grim inventory of losses: the Jagger Reading Room was gutted, along with 70,000 books, a collection of government records from across the continent, and the entire African Studies Film Collection.
Organised working-class activists in Cape Town, as well as less organised community protesters across the country, have continued to demand more police stations, more equipment and more police officers in poor neighbourhoods to combat crime, pointing out what amounts to a racist distribution of policing resources. The broader, less nuanced, conversation in South Africa continually returns to criminal justice metrics: why don’t the police arrest more, why don’t the state defenders prosecute more, why don’t the courts convict more? Other conversations veer towards reigning the police in: less torture, less killing of protesters, less assault of sex workers.
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