“I am studying mathematics because I wanted to study something as difficult as it is useless.” I follow this statement with a polite laugh and wink. This is how I answer a person asking me why I’m studying a subject that most people regard with a terrified shudder (no doubt linked to their bad memories […]
Siyanda Mohutsiwa
Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 20-year-old mathematics major in her final year at the University of Botswana. An avid reader, sighing feminist and optimistic African, she can be found behaving inelegantly on twitter (@siyandawrites) and doing the same on zanews.co.za (siyanda-panda). www.siyandawrites.com (the password is "panda", use it wisely).
Posted inEquality, Lifestyle, Media
Reclaiming ‘bitch’ a pointless exercise
I need us to get serious for a few minutes. Let’s take some time to cut the jokes for once and start to look at this issue with the seriousness it deserves. Because I’m quite sure if we did, we’d be able to agree on the sham that is “reclamation of words”. “Reclamation of words” […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, Health, Lifestyle
Why we choose materialism – part 2
Because, it is far easier to want a nicer, more expensive outfit than it is to ask ourselves why we can never conceive that we are enough as we are. It is easier to want a better, higher paying job than to ask ourselves what happened to the idealism that had once dominated our youth […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle
Why we choose materialism – part 1
Some of us choose materialism. The decision to put all our hopes and dreams into a basket weaved out of the material of economic consumerism is one we make almost every day. We do so because it is more simple to write down a list of objects we want to own than it is to […]
Posted inGeneral
Black mouths, white voices
“You can teach a dog how to walk on its hind legs and put a diamond collar around its neck, but it’s still a dog.” No such saying exists in Zulu, or any other Bantu language for that matter. And yet the writers of Intersexions expected us to believe that. This quote featured on the […]
Posted inEquality
Language survival, some harsh truths
The definition of a dying language is not a complicated matter. It is not even a semi-complicated matter. But it is certainly quite a sensitive matter for many middle-class Africans living in the era of globalisation and neo-colonialism. It is threatening what many consider their “African identity” so intimately there appears to be no escape. […]