“The erosion of institutions” has become something of a buzzword. Add to this the “paralysis in crucial institutions”, and “institutional fabric being unwound”, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in Mobutu’s Zaire. They’re usually adjectives attributed to the local commentariat: which interpret any event as a sign of the country’s imminent implosion/race war […]
media
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
In defence of journalistic objectivity
The appearance in public of senior editorial members of the Independent media group in ANC garb has occasioned a vibrant if sometimes bitter debate about independence and partisanship. What set off a lively and sometimes-acrimonious debate was an article by Daily Maverick writer Marianne Thamm, who raised the idea of journalistic “objectivity”. She wrote: “The […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The politics of speaking English well
While reading Stephen Grootes’ article, “The politics of navigating the English Language”, I became increasingly annoyed. In a country with 11 official languages why are we overly concerned with how well people speak English? Grootes’ article looks at prominent political leaders and how they fair when presenting themselves in English. The unintended consequence of writing […]
Posted inGeneral
A novel that can teach us how to rebel against the colonisation of the mind
What do you get when you project the present media-saturated and media-sustained global economic-political hegemony into the future? You get a society where the kind of colonisation of the mind, brought about mainly through mainstream media’s incessant distribution of standardised discourses affirming the nonsense, that there is “no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism, is exacerbated to […]
Posted inEquality, Lifestyle
African women, we’re not exotic, just hot
Last month I had the pleasure of attending an African Women’s Development Fund and Femrite creative non-fiction writing workshop for African women writers in Entebbe, Uganda. The women I met there were amazing for two main reasons. Their passion, intelligence and drive made me question mine (apparently watching Come Dine With Me is not a […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
#Bringbackourgirls, Lwandle, Gaza and detaching from this world
It started with the #Bringbackourgirls campaign. I hadn’t followed the story closely, but when I read articles to make sense of what had happened, I couldn’t make sense of it. I tried to imagine people coming into my school and taking away the students and there being no sense of security or outcry. I tried […]
Posted inGeneral, Media
Capitalism: Why we live in a ‘schizo society’
What a pleasure it is to be in Istanbul — probably the most sensuous city in the world — for a conference on one of the most innovative and profound thinkers of the 20th century, if not in the history of philosophy, Gilles Deleuze (whose extensive collaborative work with Felix Guattari makes it imperative to […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Of clowns, covert racism and whitewashing black concerns
The furore over the cartoon depicting the ANC parliamentarians and their electorate as a bunch of inept clowns is indicative of how far we still have to go in terms of embedded and unconscious racism in South Africa. There is nothing wrong with critiquing government in satirical depictions, but there is something horribly wrong when […]
Posted inEquality, Media
Lines of privilege
“I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” These are the words that played over and over in my mind while I was at the Franschhoek Literary Festival (FLF) this past weekend. Two friends and I attended two sessions on the festival’s final […]
Posted inNews/Politics
SA owes Mazibuko a thank you
The Sunday Times carried the headline “Shock as Mazibuko quits DA”. The print version of the paper carried the sub-heading “Move kept under wraps and party leader Zille told only later yesterday”. Beyond this the front page of the paper conveyed precious little information — half of the expanse of the page being taken up […]
Posted inMedia
And the Oscar goes to hypocrisy
The Oscar frenzy has commenced. And I don’t mean the one with the shiny gold men. The trial of the century has begun, you guys. And it’s making me ashamed to work in the media. Look, I’m no legal expert so I don’t have much of an opinion on the proceedings. Except one. Oscar killed […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Triumph of capitalism: The new world plague
Some time ago, while working on a bigger project concerning contemporary society, I took Slavoj Žižek as my point of departure to raise the question of the state of the “ethical” today. This morning, when I was looking at Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (Routledge 1994) in the context of this project, I noticed a […]