Feature

Factions fuel violence at Durban hostel

Sitting on a worn-out green sofa outside Durban’s giant Glebelands hostel, Thulani Kati describes in graphic detail his alleged torture by a special police unit on 2 October this year.

Fatima Asmal and Barbara Maregele

Feature | 28 November 2014

“You see yourself vanishing and you think: I’m going to die”

Andaleeb Rinquest remembers the moment she accepted, with certainty, the imminence of her own death.

Daneel Knoetze

Feature | 26 November 2014

We know how to bear hardships, says Chinese trader in Khayelitsha

Next to a small fruit stand and across the street from a hodgepodge of street vendors, Cuiyi Lin sits in front of her furniture store every day waiting for customers. She is the only non-African in the area.

Joyce Xi

Feature | 19 November 2014

Over a million children fall through foster care cracks

Over a million orphans and abused, neglected, and abandoned children in South Africa are falling through the cracks of an overburdened foster care system.

Joyce Xi

Feature | 12 November 2014

R400 million firearms control system in shambles

Pressure is mounting on the police to sort out problems with a R400 million firearms control system, ten years after the contract to develop it was signed with Pretoria-based company Waymark Infotech.

Daneel Knoetze

Feature | 17 October 2014

In the business of building shacks

Sheffield Road, one of the busiest roads in Philippi, has become one of the city’s best-known places to buy a shack. Here, builders make a living providing affordable housing for township residents.

Joyce Xi and Mary-Anne Gontsana

Feature | 14 October 2014

Ebola: Where are the sick and dying?

The driver puts his fist on the hooter insistently, indicating to oncoming vehicles, people and animals to move out of our path, which is obscured by lush forest at every corner.

Kathryn Stinson

Feature | 7 October 2014

Khayelitsha toilet audit finds “dire” results

One in four of the Khayelitsha public toilets, which are supposed to be cleaned by the City of Cape Town's janitorial services, is not working, a social audit by the Social Justice Coalition has found.

GroundUp staff

Feature | 1 October 2014

How a group of Cape Flats women is trying to make their community safer

During the day, a group of six women from the Retreat area enjoy beadwork, looking after their grandchildren and helping the aged, but at night, they take on the streets in one of the most notorious gang-ridden areas of the Cape Flats.

Barbara Maregele and Katy Scott

Feature | 28 September 2014

The state of South African Sign Language

The last full week of September, which is Deaf Awareness Month, is the International Week of the Deaf. This year the theme is ‘Strengthening Human Diversity’.

Katy Scott

Feature | 26 September 2014