This week in civil society — Helen Suzman lecture and exploring links between SA’s luxury property market and money laundering

On Thursday, 14 November, at 1 pm, Open Secrets will launch its new report on links between South Africa’s luxury property sector and money laundering and corruption on the continent.

For Sale: South Africa’s Property Laundromat exposes how SA’s luxury property market is used to launder illicit funds, enabling grand corruption in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea.

The report launch will explore the need for stricter anti-money laundering enforcement and the socio-economic implications of inaction.

Venue: Community House, 41 Salt River Road, Salt River, Cape Town, 7925

Register here to secure your place.



Also happening on Thursday, 14 November, at 1pm, the Society, Work and Politics Institute (Swop) from Wits University will host a research workshop seminar on the circulation and reproduction of racialised capitalism in Gauteng.

Presented by Bridget Kenny, the seminar forms part of Swop’s Urban Crisis seminar series.

Kenny argues that the process of restructuring investment, rescaling of space and reorganisation of the labour process and conditions of work in logistics all rely on exploiting infrastructural labour, which is mostly black and further invisibilised, reinforcing a long history of racist labour regimes in the country.

“Logistics becomes a particularly vivid site for a conjunctural analysis of changing capital accumulation, the enduring exploitation of living labour, and powerful significations around new technology, development and the nation which undervalue and obscure black workers’ labour in a repetition of historical forms of racialised capitalism in South Africa now,” the poster reads.

Venue: Wits Anthropology Museum

Register here for in-person attendance and for online attendence here.



Also on Thursday, 14 November, at 6pm, the Helen Suzman Foundation will host its Annual Memorial Lecture 

Guest speaker Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, the founder of Gift of the Givers, will reflect on the role civil society has played in advancing social justice in South Africa for 30 years of democracy and beyond.

Venue: The Forum, Alice Lane, Sandton 

Register here to reserve your seat.



On Friday, 15 November, at 9am, the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) will host a seminar on the sectoral and firm-level determinants of top earnings in South Africa.

In this hybrid event, Rafeal De La Vega explores income distribution in South Africa using employer-employee data from the National Treasury Secure Data Facility.

“Developing countries are typically understudied in the literature on top incomes, despite the salience of inequality in many of them. Additionally, these countries undergo processes of structural change as they develop, which could make income distribution worse,” the event poster reads.

Venue: North Lodge, SCIS Seminar Room, Parktown Management Campus, Johannesburg.

Register for the online discussion here. DM