“Every black African everywhere is rightly or wrongly perceived to originate — a contentious concept in itself — from somewhere. Almost overwhelmingly that somewhere is consensually assumed, indeed believed, to be an idyllic village perched somewhere far away in rural crevices. Even today, when someone asks you in the city, or at a dinner table […]
Equality
Posted inEquality, Media
The dangerous sentimentality of Alice Mann’s ‘Domestic Bliss’
A photographic series by a white employer on her domestic worker was always going to be problematic, but I didn’t know how problematic until I was presented with Alice Mann’s Domestic Bliss. In her artist statement she says: “This series of portraits depicts black, female domestic workers in the homes of their white employers in […]
Posted inEquality
What does a ‘non-racial’ SA look like?
The University of California Humanities Research Institute’s Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory in conjunction with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research’s (Wiser) Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism kicked off yesterday at the University of the Witwatersrand. The theme is “Archives of the Non-Racial“. It began with a conversation between Ahmed Kathrada and […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Can SA, India and Brazil reboot the global human-rights narrative?
There is a pressing need for southern democracies to reclaim the human-rights narrative from the strategic imperatives of traditionally powerful western governments. While the ability of India, Brazil and South Africa to emerge as moral voices from the south is not in doubt, their willingness to take the global centre-stage on human rights is certainly […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
The problem with ’emasculating men’
“Gender activist” Mbuyiselo Botha and University of South Africa professor Kopano Ratele recently wrote an article published in the Sunday Independent titled “Capitalism has emasculated black men”. They argue that “the struggle of the mineworkers is part of the long war waged by the black working class and poor men to regain their self-worth”. And […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
An ordinary evening
On a Thursday evening not so long ago I decided to stop by Woolies on the way home. I got off the train earlier, got some groceries, and undertook the walk from Claremont to my house in Harfield. I had underestimated the weather. It was howling with wind and I spent most of the journey […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Of clowns, covert racism and whitewashing black concerns
The furore over the cartoon depicting the ANC parliamentarians and their electorate as a bunch of inept clowns is indicative of how far we still have to go in terms of embedded and unconscious racism in South Africa. There is nothing wrong with critiquing government in satirical depictions, but there is something horribly wrong when […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Privatisation of governance: A multi-stakeholder slippery slope
As the world debates the new set of internationally agreed sustainable development goals, influential politicians, technocrats and captains of industry are humming a common tune. They are busy promoting “public-private partnerships” as the panacea to fix governance failures, and as the silver bullet for the post-2015 agenda. Although, innocuous and even benign sounding, public-private partnerships […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
South Africa’s rape crisis
By Sadé Savings, One Young World Ambassador from South Africa. One of the greatest challenges facing South African women today is the increasingly prevalent and horrifically brutal acts of sexual violence being perpetuated against women and small children. Statistics SA reveals that South Africa has one of the highest rates of rape in the world, […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Joyce Banda, neither saint nor sinner
Written with Lindiwe Makhunga* The defeat of incumbent Joyce Banda in Malawi’s recent and controversial presidential elections, raises some uncomfortable but necessary questions about what constitutes collective expectations of women’s formal leadership in sub-Saharan Africa. On Saturday, Peter Mutharika of Malawi’s Democratic Progressive Party emerged as the winner with 36.4% of the vote, Lazarus Chakwera […]
Posted inEquality
Maya Angelou: A phenomenal life for a phenomenal woman
“There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn’t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend” writes Dr Maya Angelou in her […]
Posted inEquality, General
Thank you Maya Angelou
I found out about Maya Angelou’s passing from a new friend while visiting Uganda. Access to the internet was sporadic and I hadn’t checked Twitter for a glimpse of what was happening in the world. When he told me I slapped him on the arm (a terrible reflex I have when I’m shocked or angry) […]