Saggy pants is a popular form of displaying rebellion to teenage respectability by young men who wear their trousers far down their waists, often times generously exposing their underwear. Saggy pants are mostly associated with black male masculinity, which has been highlighted by the imagery often associated with mainstream hip-hop culture. Of course today this […]
race relations
Posted inGeneral
Black and white: New labels to make South Africans happy
Hell it’s been “black” this and “white” that for the past couple of weeks here on Thought Leader with Gillian Schutte, myself and others jumping on the bandwagon. In fact between Gillian and I have lowered the level of debate to something you’d read on that other much less intelligent riff-raff blog hosted by a […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Dear White People
I have decided to start the New Year with a letter to you all. It is a letter that implores you to wake up and smell Africa with a fresh white nose. Before you get angry and defensive, think of this letter as a crash course survival kit for navigating a new reality, and please […]
Posted inGeneral
How can we see from this high horse?
There are too many high horses in South Africa. Too many haughty opinions. And not enough people admitting to their faults. We need to all climb down and roll around in the muck for a bit. Act like pigs and love it. Admit that we are shit and get on with it. I will not […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle, News/Politics
Let’s think about our children
The story of Rego Modise of Rustenburg has me worried about the future of our kids, black and white, in South Africa. Rego is a 17-year-old black school girl who loves playing hockey as a sport. She sees herself as a professional hockey player one day, perhaps even representing South Africa in future Olympic games. […]
Posted inGeneral
Let’s talk: White fears and black aspirations
South Africa has always had a history of bad race relations, but after 1994 we all held high hopes of improved race relations and tolerance. How wrong we were. The issue is simply that South Africans are selfish. All race groups are! We simply refuse to step into one another’s shoes and try to understand […]
Posted inGeneral
The problem is not black and white
It was 1994 and a Canadian comic at a South African festival thought that given our apartheid history, he’d be edgy by poking fun at race. He got mere titters and derisory silences from the audience. He didn’t realise: we got race. We South Africans had been through race, come back and turned it inside […]
Posted inNews/Politics
What makes you a bad black?
Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bright-eyed bushy-tailed little black Sipho was born with a defect, which doctors would later recognise to be a dictionary, in his mouth. Little Sipho was a curious little boy, reading anything he could get his tiny Zulu hands on (of course, relative to other kids his […]