Azad Essa

As if the electorate could be any more bewildered by current South African politics, the decision to drop all corruption charges against Jacob Zuma has turned ordinary South Africans into believers, converted sceptics into philosophers and motored immigration turnstiles into action. Just a week before the “most important election” and the electorate couldn’t be more […]

While studying in Delhi some years back, the sociology department organised a “study trip” for our class to the north Indian hill station town Dharamsala, where his holiness, the Dalai Lama has lived in exile for the last five decades along with about 8 000 Tibetan refugees. Like most “study trips”, there was no studying as […]

George Bush, Walmart and the “World” Series are normally enough reason to dislike the United States. But if you’re a “rational” soul, and yet still unsure why the world simply cannot run out of reasons to malign the United States; go borrow yourself a couple of mates and run to your local cinema to check […]

In a democracy, today’s leadership is tomorrow’s electorate; power is never predestined and children are not heirs (except of course to hot off-the-cuff black economic empowerment deals). Today, our kings and queens are presidents and prime ministers voted in, not born or ordained by God. They are practical assimilations of royalty without the creed or […]

Until a year ago, social scientists, analysts, historians and the local peanut gallery had been formulating complete genealogies to understand HIV/Aids denialism in the highest office. Sociologists and anthropologists had fallen over one another in weaving theory between meta-theory, digging up Foucault, Spivak and Said in attempting to construct an Africanist approach to understanding vitamins, […]