Thought Leader

Durban January 25 2019 The First Officer of State, and The First Officer of Government Republic of South Africa I hereby tender an offer to purchase from the state and the government of the Republic of South Africa the parastatals, now in part known as the state-owned enterprises of the Republic of South Africa, in…

In The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1972) Fredric Jameson opens the Preface with the following thought-provoking remark (p. v): The history of thought is the history of its models. Classical mechanics, the organism, natural selection, the atomic nucleus or electronic field, the computer: such are some of the objects or systems which, first…

Liminality is a strange phenomenon: The Encarta dictionary online defines it as ‘belonging to the point of conscious awareness below which something cannot be experienced or felt’, which is only one of the ways the term is used, but nevertheless gives a good idea of what is involved when you call something ‘liminal’. The point…

Most people don’t know what complex systems (the word ‘complex’ is important) are, despite the fact that everyone one is enmeshed in several such complex systems every minute of the day and night. One such complex system is language, which we use more or less all the time, except when we sleep, and even then,…

In India, the caste system controls everything, even with the modernisation that has made parts of the caste system illegal. It regulates occupation, vocation, profession and education by determining who gets what opportunity. It determines association, such that the freedom of association is limited insofar as not enabling cross-caste association. In India it is the…

In a recent article titled ‘The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat’, by Richard Fisher, he makes the following sober (and sobering) remark about the people — our children and grandchildren — who are likely to be alive when the iconic year, 2100, dawns: All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be…

Again Patricia De Lille has left her political home and has once again established a new political party. I think back to 2003, when I was an intern floating about the Parliamentary Precinct, doing nonsensical things; and Patricia De Lille left the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and established the Independent Democrats (ID). Resplendent…

Cape Town, like any urban area, is a city on the move. You can see it in every corner of its 2 461km2 metropolitan area, where 3.7-million people jostle for space on our roads. From Mitchells Plain to Milnerton, Sea Point to Strand, congestion is commonplace and smog levels are rising. Traffic jams mean lost…

We have been giving the ANC the opportunity of controlling the state of the Republic of South Africa since 1994. Every five years we have renewed that authority, through the instances of the ten million or so voters who voted African National Congress. The ANC has had access to and authority over the state without…

Okay, so I have decided to make my decision publicly. Cue the applause and the investigations, I want polite applause for the democratic victory, and I want a thorough, purposeful, unrelenting and invasive investigation that finds and interrogates every individual thing and every possible system that has anything to do with this matter. There is…