Yesterday we honoured Youth Day in South Africa, a day when we remember the hundreds of young people who were massacred in 1976 by the apartheid regime for their peaceful protests against a state education system that sought to forever keep them as economic slaves. It took the courage of children to bring the apartheid…
“Silly, stupid children” That’s what some people are calling you on social media. “Silly”, because you had the courage to speak truth to power, demand dignity and recognition for the pain that you feel? “Silly, stupid children” That’s what some people are calling you on social media. “Stupid”, because you dared to allow your…
As a new mother, I spend a lot of time obsessing over the future, I wonder what my daughter’s speaking voice will sound like, whether she will be stubborn like her mother or kind and generous like her father. I think about what career she will choose and agonise over how best we can prepare…
The Reuters article on cancer in Africa that appeared in the Mail & Guardian on May 1 was an important reminder to all of us that while head-butting HIV and tackling TB, rushing food parcels to the malnourished thousands around the continent and battling our way through the diarrhoeas and pneumonias that plague our sickly…
This past week has definitely had us pulling out our calculators and knotting our eyebrows as we tried to scrutinise the numbers, analyse the figures, and work out what the increases and decreases (and haircuts) of the 2012 national budget will mean for our own pockets. Ofcourse, I being the medic that I am (and…
Health systems news and health systems financing news, in particular, seldom get the nation talking. But the announcement of the imminent arrival of National Health Insurance (NHI) on our shores, and the subsequent release of the policy paper on the NHI, certainly did. And rightly so! For a country that spends a respectable percentage of…
I was born at Mamelodi Day Hospital in 1985. At a time when the apartheid government was getting anxious about the longevity of their antics, when the people were realising that perhaps they could really beat this thing, when everyone, white and black alike, could feel that the air was different. There were many of us…
