By Walter Bhengu Every Sunday evening at 7pm as many people wrap up their weekend in anticipation for the week ahead, a show, which has taken the airwaves by storm, plays on Mzansi Magic. Our Perfect Wedding draws a large viewership judging by how it trends every Sunday on social media with the hash tag […]
Equality
Posted inEquality
Biko lives but transformation suffers
As we commemorate the brutal and barbaric killing of Stephen Bantu Biko this time of the year we are once again forced to reflect on where we are as a country against the ideals that Biko died for. South Africa is also marking 20 years of political independence. It is fitting, indeed, to ask and […]
Posted inEquality, Media, News/Politics
Leave Judge Masipa alone
I have little interest in the Oscar Pistorius trial. I empathise with the loss of, and damage to, life as a result of Pistorius’s actions. This case has, unfortunately, been given more attention than it should. The fact that the victim, and the accused, are well-known, white, moneyed, and privileged, has resulted in this case […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, News/Politics
Anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa: The Hart-Devlin debate revisited
The news this week that The Gambia has passed a Bill that further criminalises homosexual conduct and imposes life sentences in cases of “aggravated” homosexuality, along with the continued coverage of the constitutional fate of similar legislation in Uganda, provides an occasion to revisit the most famous debate about the criminalisation of homosexuality in the […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The problem with being previously disadvantaged
“But we’re not previously disadvantaged … we’re not underprivileged” my students tried to reason with me recently. We were talking about school issues and the issue of the school’s identity came up. I teach at a fairly new school in Cape Town which has been dubbed as a maths and science-focused school for students from […]
Posted inEquality, Lifestyle, Media
Feminism isn’t for everybody, but it could be
This morning I read Danielle Bowler’s commentary on the good versus bad feminist debate in her column “We are all bad feminists, and that’s okay”. While I’m all for a nuanced and reflexive critique on feminisms and their limitations in order to better develop and strengthen the movement, I found myself puzzled by what read […]
Posted inEquality, Media
A big, fat, Mzansi advertising migraine
Advertising has a way of carrying our collective cultural fantasies in nifty little 30-second bites on television and single-page print adverts in newspaper or magazines, which seem, at first, harmless and fun until, of course, they begin to illuminate the forces that inform the images we see and the consequenses of those images to our […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
Killing in the name of God
No thinking person can escape being horrified by the actions carried out in the name of God by religious fanatics across the world today. Killings, rapes, executions, wholesale slaughter, genocide, torture, and sometimes just ordinary nastiness — a litany of horrors that deny humankind the right to claim ourselves to be a uniformly emotionally intelligent […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Grieve, thy beloved country
By Judy Sikuza In 1994 a colossal death occurred in South Africa. The subject befallen by fate’s calling was none other than Accused Number 1948 – universally known as apartheid. The fall of this stupendous monster came with a promise of the new — a rainbow nation South Africa — where our differences would be […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
Exposing the great ‘poverty-reduction’ scandal
The received wisdom comes to us from every direction: poverty rates are declining and extreme poverty will soon be eradicated from the face of the earth. This narrative is delivered by the World Bank, the governments of rich countries, and – most importantly – the UN Millennium Development campaign. Relax, they tell us. The world […]
Posted inEquality, General
Times are changing…
It was at a girl’s varsity residence room the morning after we had sex that I read, for the first time, Steve Biko’s I write what I like. I was lying next to her, naked, and she had a handful of books on a bedside table. I read the first few essays, which left me […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Reflections on Gaza: How should my people be?
By Pedro Tabensky As the son of a Holocaust survivor and a refugee of mid-20th century turmoil, knowledge of the precariousness of existence has always been part of the fabric of my life, and has motivated me permanently to ask: How should I be in a way that pays respect to the suffering of my […]