“We support a free press and we encourage journalists to write about us. But if they write rubbish, we will find them and hang them in a public square.” This, surprisingly, is not what Helen Zille said, but it might well have been. She said: “I will defend journalists’ RIGHT to write rubbish. But I…
Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula, the “Razzmatazz” himself, has caused a furore by going off like a dirty bomb at Bafana Bafana. “The two-legged Goats” — as I call them — were brutally booted out of the African Nations Championship (Chan) by the Super Eagles of Naija. This is maybe the gazillionth time that the Goats*…
“Who’s your daddy?” This is the infamous slogan of commercialised intimacy. A masculine Mandingo demands an answer, while his submissive remnant of a woman is supposed to respond with “Yes, you are my daddy!” Eric Zorn deconstructed the phrase in a piece in the Chicago Tribune. He described it as “a boastful claim of dominance…
Black people — especially those among us who are still nursing wounds and raw apartheid pain — are being blackmailed into accepting a distorted narrative of black resistance. Nelson Mandela — the fervent leader of the mass resistance movement, the founder of the African National Congress’s youth brigade, the calculated strategist who was part of…
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela Dear Mr President. I imagine that the African National Congress is scrambling, like many others, to appropriate and monopolise on Mandela’s legacy. His legacy is important to the ANC, and it should be. Mandela is a symbol of the…
About a week ago I read an uncomfortable piece about the unwillingness of black people to share their cultures. The author insinuates that black South Africans remain willingly enclaved in a cocoon of apartheid pain. My objections were immediate and loud. This post is an afterthought and a result of some reflection. Culture in South…
Now and I again my friends, who seem never to pay attention to anything I tell them, ask me about my career plans. “So, which area of law will you specialise in?” they ask. When I tell them that I am training to specialise in commercial law, I see their curiosity whirling to awe. I…
I am a heterosexual man; I have been one for as long as I can remember. I remember three distinct stages of my development as such a man. I remember boyhood. During this time I had a healthy and innocent fascination with girls. I liked playing with them, I liked touching them and their attention…
In a World Economic Forum Davos session titled “De-Risking Africa” — on which presidents Jacob Zuma and Goodluck Jonathan, Sunil Bharti Mittal (Bharti Enterprises), Graham Mackay (SABMiller), and Louise Arbour (International Crisis Group) sat as panellists — President Jacob Zuma took exception to the session’s basic assumption that Africa has a “special case” of corruption….
To sincerely (and fiercely) discuss Zimbabwe’s future, we must first recount what we know about Zimbabwe’s past. The past is the appropriate context within which we must frame our judgment of Zimbabwe’s progress. We know that in the “Scramble for Africa” Zimbabwe became a British colony. That in 1930 land ownership was racialised by the…
