Last month I had the pleasure of attending an African Women’s Development Fund and Femrite creative non-fiction writing workshop for African women writers in Entebbe, Uganda. The women I met there were amazing for two main reasons. Their passion, intelligence and drive made me question mine (apparently watching Come Dine With Me is not a […]
Equality
Posted inEquality
Blackface, Khaya Dlanga and why we can’t disentangle sexism from racism
Speaking recently at Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism in Cape Town, iconic political activist and scholar Angela Davis in her talk “Anti-Racism: Transnational Solidarities” remarked that “black unity” is often a term that never fits the lived reality of many black people. She made an example of how in the “black power” movements in […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Marikana widows shed tears in Women’s Month
This Women’s Month marks two years since the Marikana massacre. The widows of the workers killed by the South African Police Service in 2012 have since received their deceased husband’s provident fund dues, but still wait for justice while the media and public attention has long since transferred from their plight to the Farlam Commission. […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
The very ordinary face of racism
Looking at the picture of the two young students from Tuks, one of the things I would like to know is: Does that paint not itch? Sweat and a thick coat of paint, they surely are strange bedfellows. Nevertheless, it seems that even the green Sunlight block of soap will not wash this paint away; […]
Posted inEquality, Health, News/Politics
Black girl desire in a time of hopelessness
I remember very well the first “sex talk” I had with my mother. We were in the rural areas for the holidays when my cousin pulled me aside to tell me that there were red spots on my trousers. What was to follow was a confusing day where I felt my body had betrayed me […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
A toyi-toyi for Doek Fridays
On Friday, the department of arts and culture introduced a “Wear a Doek Fridays” campaign to mark Women’s Month. Women took to the streets of Twitter brandishing retweets of outrage. With each minute the Twitter numbers started to swell. A sign that those without a 3G internet connection were arriving at their places of work. […]
Posted inEquality
The ancient Greeks’ wisdom regarding sexual orientation
As history unfolds, people tend to regard earlier eras as being surpassed in practically all areas of cultural activity, the most obvious one being technology — “progress” regarding which, incidentally, seems to me to be proportional to retrogression in other spheres of culture, specifically self-understanding: the more gadgets there are to be fascinated by, the […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
David Saks and the naturalness of white contempt
In Ubuntu: Curating the Archive (edited by Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla), Ama Biney notes in the chapter “The Historical Discourse on Humanism: Interrogating the Paradoxes” that Aimé Cesaire notably made the case that Hitler’s crime was mainly that “he applied to Europe colonialist procedures, which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
Like every other day of my life, this morning I woke up female
Once I was a girl, then I was somewhere in between, and now I am an adult woman. What that means for me is not the same as it is for other women. We can know our similarities and differences, but we cannot know any other life as intimately and honestly as we know our […]
Posted inEquality
Rethinking ‘townships’
By Lucille Dawkshas What are “townships”? I’ve often thought of them in terms of the visual meaning of outlying “ships” to the central harbour of a CBD, but what makes suburban areas any different? Wikipedia’s contributors tell me “townships” are: “the (often underdeveloped) urban living areas that, from the late 19th century until the end […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Mandela Day – a neocolonial exercise in the commodification of the good black
While every other black leader in a post-1994 South Africa has been constructed as an inferior “other” by the dominant discourse, Nelson Mandela has been deified as a saintly black and is held in high esteem by whiteness. He has been hailed as a decent and rational African by the moderate liberal white discourse and […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Lindiwe Sisulu and the myth of ‘welfare queens’
Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu is no stranger to the spotlight. Despite being one of the highest-ranking female leaders in the ANC, the spotlight tends to follow her for all the wrong reasons. And that’s why I’ve always watched her carefully. The daughter of a political dynasty and a surviving doyenne in the continuous internal struggle […]