A Quote by Ory Okolloh

Omidyar Network first supported Africa Check in 2014 when they were a team of just three dedicated people intent on building a more fact-based environment for public debate in South Africa.
South Africa is regarded as being an extraordinarily important country - not just for South Africa, but for Southern Africa, for the BRICS, working now in a new way in which power is becoming more shared - thankfully.
In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia.
We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.
I haven't traveled in Africa nearly as much as I'd like to. I've been there a few times, and I'd like to learn more about the various cultures in Africa. But that's the basis point of where all of the music that I love is based upon, from Africa to Cuba to Puerto Rico to South America.
And now South Africa has finally woken up and it is doing great things. And if South Africa becomes the template to what AIDS is in the sub-Saharan continent, then all the other countries are going to follow suit. And Michel Sidibe, who spoke at the breakfast meeting this morning, was saying that there is so much hope for Africa now that South Africa has got its house in order.
We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.
As we mourn President Mandela’s passing we must ask ourselves the fundamental question - what shall we do to respond to the tasks of building a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa, a people-centred society free of hunger, poverty, disease and inequality, as well as Africa’s renaissance, to whose attainment President Nelson Mandela dedicated his whole life?
There are people here [in South Africa] who, whatever the debate is on a particular issue, their dominating idea is that at the end of the debate we must emerge stronger than we were before and closer to one another.
My first introduction to South Africa's struggle for freedom came when I was just 17. I had volunteered to speak in my mother's stead at a United Nations forum on South Africa because she was unable to attend on that occasion.
Theatre has had a very important role in changing South Africa. There was a time when all other channels of expression were closed that we were able to break the conspiracy of silence, to educate people inside South Africa and the outside world. We became the illegal newspaper.
I think we have got the wood on South Africa, but that does not mean they are not a good team. They intimidate a lot of teams but we intimidate them. There is no disrespect for South Africa; they are a very good team.
Nelson Mandela was an outstanding leader and a mentor for me. I was in South Africa at the time he was released. I was in South Africa when he was inaugurated as the first president.
As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination.
I was 15 years old when I first heard the name Mandela, or Madiba, as he is fondly known in Africa. In apartheid South Africa he was public enemy number one. Shrouded in secrecy, myth and rumour, the media called him 'The Black Pimpernel'.
When I was in government, the South African economy was growing at 4.5% - 5%. But then came the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, and so the global economy shrunk. That hit South Africa very hard, because then the export markets shrunk, and that includes China, which has become one of the main trade partners with South Africa. Also, the slowdown in the Chinese economy affected South Africa. The result was that during that whole period, South Africa lost something like a million jobs because of external factors.
Even in South Africa, the Commonwealth were not doing anything, and their attitude was to tolerate apartheid in South Africa. There was a lot of lip service being paid to the need to stop this practice, but nothing was done.
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