So, I have registered to vote in South Africa for the first time. Who, then, shall I vote for? Sometimes the simplest questions are unbearably difficult to answer. The easy part is, of course, entering the polling booth, a domain situated behind a veil of secrecy, and enact perhaps the most atomistic ritual in liberal […]
Media
Posted inEquality, Media
‘12 Years a Slave’: Is it relevant to South Africans?
By Thulani Grenville-Grey I saw 12 Years a Slave recently. I wanted to see something real that would make me feel “deep-down” things, you know, fundamental things. I wanted to feel outraged about something worth feeling outraged about, have an opinion about an Oscar-nominated movie, form a critique, have something to argue about into the […]
Posted inGender violence, Media
Shaming rape survivors and other bull
“What a week for women! First, two of the (very few) prominent political mavens became kissing besties and then spectacularly not, and then that rape-cry-baby Michelle Solomon made a scene and had to be put back in her place by a good ol’ cigar-smokin’ man like David Bullard (for a bet it turns out, classic!) […]
Posted inGender violence, Media, News/Politics
Breaking my Bullard silence
Say what you wanna say and let the words fall out I wanna see you be brave. There I was driving along Witkoppen with Jacaranda on the radio — for once, I was a classic shooter curtain cliché — and those words struck home. So here I am, being brave — or stupid — and […]
Posted inEquality, Media, News/Politics
Let’s talk about the protests. Where is the empathy and outrage?
“The country is burning”. “Burning frustration”. “Hot-headed in South Africa”. These are the headlines that abound about the many protests that are currently erupting around South Africa. On television we witness mobs of black people apparently running amok, building barricades and burning tyres. We hear of the disenfranchised masses dancing, picking up rocks and supposedly […]
Posted inGender violence, Media
I’ve had enough of Bullard. And so should you
In 2008, proud racist David Bullard was fired from the Sunday Times for a column wherein he denigrated black South Africans. In seems that, after the failure of his many legal matters against the Sunday Times and its owning company Avusa, Bullard found a new hobby. And that hobby is harassing and bullying rape survivors – and I get the special honour of being his target of choice.
Posted inGender violence, Media
David Bullard, do not pass begin, do not collect R200
When you can’t afford to invest in a new hobby, or buy a new car, or take a life-changing trip because you’re a bitter journalist who’s basically ragged on every publication they have ever worked for … then the next best thing to do is obviously start trolling people on Twitter. A public space, where […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics, Tech
The French philosopher and the American whistle-blower
Unless one acknowledges the complex nature and often unexpected connections among things, events and people, one might find it a smidgen astonishing that what the French poststructuralist philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard, wrote in his “report” on the state of knowledge in “advanced” societies, better known as The Postmodern Condition (1979; English translation: Manchester University Press, 1984), […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Signs of the times: The spectacle of mourning Mandela
By Matthew Rumbold “In an economic, elliptic, hence, dogmatic way, I would say that there is no politics without an organisation of the time and space of mourning, without a topolitology of the sepulcher, without an anamnesic and thematic relation to the spirit as ghost, without an open hospitality to the guest as ghost.” Jacques […]
Posted inEquality, General, Media, News/Politics
Be cruel to be cruel
It is May 1968. Raging in the streets of Paris, the (in)famous student uprisings. On the walls of the Sorbonne a slogan appears: “SOYONS CRUELS!” / “BE CRUEL!” Someone comes up to you and asks: “Have you seen this writing on the wall? What is it telling me to do?” Cruelty, by which I mean […]
Posted inMedia, Tech
Forget cyberbullying, I suffer from hit remorse
I can’t believe I’ve done it again. I’ve gone ahead with the not-so-good old hand slam. Flipped the bird to every fibre of my not-so-absolute sense of morality and reared the ugly head of the secret monster. Immediately post-contact, post-hit, post-click, click, click boom I find my heart starts to beat a bit faster. It […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Hands off the estate tussle between the Mandela children
By Melo Magolego One uneventful day on a busy street in Bophuthatswana there lay, riddled with bullets, the body of my grandfather. My paternal grandfather had two wives and was a migrant labourer. Before retirement, he made his way by delivering those cast iron manhole covers which we use to obscure our sordid secrets. He […]