The “village” and your family are supposed to be the first school everyone is exposed to. They’re supposed to teach us the fundamentals of living harmoniously together and sharing this world with others. But both the school and family are fighting for their very survival in today’s so-called modern forms of social organisation. The township […]
2011
Posted inLifestyle
How to drive through a brick wall
By Roger Diamond There are two ways to drive through a brick wall. One is to stop driving, get out the car and go and be all physical, engage with the wall, bash it, break it, explode it or use whatever you can think of to level the bugger. Then get back into the car […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
China’s alternative to an American addiction
Last week saw the launch of BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, a rich seam of energy industry stats that journalists, analysts and academics will spend many hours mining for nuggets of data that support their chosen narratives. The Financial Times led with “China becomes leading user of energy” – hardly a revelation to even […]
Posted inGeneral
Hey babes! The mystery and juiciness of women
The female model on the billboard promoting cosmetics stares back at me with an emptiness that edges my skin with goose pimples. She is not smiling, but gazing emptily, vaguely, at me – with that hollowness which says she is not staring at me, but at the cold frost of camera lenses taken somewhere else […]
Posted inGeneral
Embrace the pain my a@#e
By Gavin Moffat A week or three ago I read these words from Scott Martin, which meant little to me at the time. “To be a cyclist is to be a student of pain … at cycling’s core lies pain, hard and bitter as the pit inside a juicy peach. It doesn’t matter if you’re […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Who did the Indians vote for?
By Suntosh Pillay Race, place and identity are all at play during elections. The election circus has left town, new mayors make old promises and the mug shots we’ve been tortured with on street poles have finally been removed. The results were predictable: the ANC a little weaker, the DA gloating its victories, Cope nearing […]
Posted inMedia
African youth 2.0
By Jacqueline Muna Musiitwa It’s a scary time to be a leader of a country, especially a country in which youth (“youth” defined by the African Youth Charter as those aged 15 to 35) issues are not adequately being addressed. With the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, some leaders must stay awake […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The counter-revolution will not be publicised
P Dexter, MP Congress of the People Chair, minister, deputy minister, chair of the Mineral Resources Committee and the director general, Advocate Sandile Nogxina, whom I also commend on his 14 years of good service to the department. I start by acknowledging my daughter, Maya, who is here today. Nearly five-years-old, she is here to […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Our blind adherence to the monogamy ideal poses a health risk
By Rachel Nyaradzo Adams Some of you may immediately smirk with a resounding no! The more cynical among us though may have already started on the thought process of acknowledging that non-monogamous behaviour within marriages and “serious” relationships is a reality. But we would rather not interrogate the ideal lest we undo a firm system […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Deaf to a nation in conversation with itself
In SA the ethnic origin and ideological lineage of an idea is more important than the merits and demerits of the idea itself.
Posted inNews/Politics
Sudan: Half the horror remains untold
Between May 19 and May 21, the northern Sudanese Armed Forces annexed the southern border town of Abyei. Next in Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s violent re-mapping of Sudan’s savannah belt by the 1956 borders is the Blue Nile and South Kordofan/Nuba Mountains. According to the boundaries drawn in 1956, shortly before Sudan gained independence from […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
What a media tribunal means
By Glenda Daniels I wonder if the media appeals tribunal the ANC wants so badly will happen. Raymond Louw, deputy chairperson of the media freedom committee at the South African National Editor’s Forum (Sanef), who I interviewed on Wednesday reflected that it would, but in about a year’s time, after an investigation into its feasibility […]