The dust has finally settled. Most schools (at least those which have textbooks and teachers present) are back into the routine. The matric results frenzy has ebbed. I’ve always been disturbed by the country’s obsession with matric results every year as though we will discover something different. Every time I think about the frenzy I […]
Athambile Masola
A teacher in Johannesburg.Interested in education,feminism and sometimes a bit of politics (with a small letter p).
Posted inGeneral
Body politics: A weighty issue
“You’re so fat” are words I began to hear a lot when I was a teenager. When I was in grade 10, I bumped into a girl I hadn’t seen since grade seven. She was shocked to see the netball player who had been her opponent transformed into a blob of flesh stuffed into a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Rural Eastern Cape aka home of legends
I recently travelled through a stretch of the Eastern Cape that used to be officially known as the Transkei. One might refer to areas such as Ngcobo, Ngqamakwe, Ugie, Elliot, Maclear, Cala, Idutywa, Gcuwa as small towns but this is a very generous definition for places that resemble “out stations” to the surrounding villages. While […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Madiba and education
I found out about uTat’Madiba’s passing on the last day of the school term. I wasn’t surprised. We saw this coming. The main theme that seems to reverberate throughout all the tributes to Tata is that we are at the end of an era and how we are going to move forward in this era […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Black women, on the up and up?
I follow US politics half-heartedly but since the first Obama presidency, US political life has become central in many ways even for people who are not interested in politics. Michelle Obama, together with her husband, became the face of a changing American society — at least that was the promise of the “rise and rise” […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The private is political: Ramphele and the Biko affair
I tried to play devil’s advocate in a conversation where Mamphela Ramphele’s affair with Steve Biko came into question. I was stunned that in a group of black women Ramphele was not the hero or the role model of what it means to be an example of a woman to be reckoned with in the […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The problem is the Englishness*
I teach English. People often have a quizzical look when I respond to the question: “Which subjects do you teach?” (I won’t belabour the race issue that underpins the subtext of the quizzical look seeing as there aren’t many black English teachers in the southern suburbs of Cape Town). I often try to explain to […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
What’s feminism got to do with Samantha Lewthwaite?
“At least she’s done something for feminism.” This is what a friend said to me when she told me that one of the identified leaders behind al-Shabab is a woman, Samantha Lewthwaite, known as the “white widow”. My knee-jerk reaction was to defend feminism by saying that feminism is about non-violence and even when a […]
Posted inEquality
The flipside of feminism gevaar
I recently stumbled upon a video clip about the book The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can’t Say (2011) written by two American women, Phyllis Schlafly and Suzanne Venker. The fact that they are white, privileged and conservative is important. If there was any furore about the book I missed […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Native life in South Africa
While watching the stories of people’s shacks being flooded in Cape Town’s informal settlements recently, I thought of Sol Plaatje and his manuscript that was published in 1916, Native life in South Africa. In response to the Native Land Act of 1913 he wrote a book highlighting the consequences of the act as well as […]
Posted inEquality
Private schools: Reminders of white supremacy
Recently I attended a high school debating competition for some of the schools in the Western Cape. The event was hosted by Bishops Diocesan College, a private school for boys neatly tucked away in Cape Town’s southern suburbs. While I marvelled at the facilities and the remnants of British colonialism in the architecture, I was […]
Posted inLifestyle
Dear Miss Dhlomo
I first noticed you on TV in the early 1990s. I was convinced you were the most beautiful person in the world (and that hasn’t changed). Thereafter I saw the work you did with True Love magazine and I became convinced that black women matter and have some space in the world. As a black […]