No matter your feelings on it, South Africa has been obsessed with the Spear. Many see it as a slur on the dignity of black people in South Africa. While others have held it up as an icon of freedom. It has consumed our media space and been on everyone’s minds. The whole issue has […]
General
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Could you handle losing your job?
Have you ever lost your job or worried about being retrenched? How did you handle it? How did you keep going? For some, the loss of a job is too much, as it was for the Cell C employee who committed suicide because he had heard he was about to lose his job. My heart […]
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On the interpretation of a painting
I did not really want to write this piece, knowing full well that it would be greeted by howls of derision and by vituperative incomprehension in many quarters. But as events unfolded in the wake of the public display, at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, of the Brett Murray painting metaphorically titled The Spear, reaching […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The Zuma portrait and black (male) sexuality
While delivering a keynote address at a conference focusing on Africa in the town of Swanwick in the UK Midlands on Saturday May 26 2012, I asked my audience what news coming out of my country or out of Africa they were aware of at this time. My audience was not aware of the exciting […]
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Ancestry & tailors
In South Africa I My ancestor sits on a wall, smiling at me, skirt billowed out, shoes muddied in tussocks. She leans forward, waiting to step to me through the centuries. She’s been there since childhood, in words whispered by a sister or brother, in the songs shimmering on a mother’s Irish lips, when I was first […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, News/Politics
Some sympathy for the editor, please
I too dislike the painting. It offends me for reasons I can’t quite fathom. I do know as satire it resembles the blow of a club more than the rapier thrust. Yet I am appalled by the Taliban-like reaction to it. Brett Murray must have an inkling of how Salman Rushdie felt. The spotlight, however, […]
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Finding heart beyond heat and ice
By Barbara Nussbaum South Africa’s high drama over Speargate has touched people deeply. Opinions have been thrown in every direction, from every corner. As we engage further in public debate in the media, we need individually and collectively to identify the many layers that make the complexity of the moment so profound. We need to […]
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Du Preez poser for Meyer
The Springbok rumour mill has been in overdrive about who Heyneke Meyer would appoint as his short term skipper for the three Test series against England. With Victor Matfield’s return now expunged by the IRB’s ruling relating to retired players (established primarily to avoid players retiring to let illegal substances pass through their system supposedly), […]
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My bruising encounter with the PC brigade
Every now and again, as a columnist for the SA Jewish Report, I drop a proverbial brick in a hornet’s nest and end up diving for cover. Thus it was a couple of weeks ago, when a column I wrote poking fun at a newly established Jewish women’s lobby group generated far less amusement and […]
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Joyce Banda: Not your average president
By Anneke Meerkotter If you do a search of Joyce Banda’s speech on May 18 2012, you will find a range of international media articles with headlines such as “Malawi president vows to repeal gay ban” (BBC, Huffington Post); “Malawi to overturn homosexual ban” (Guardian); “Malawi president to repeal gay laws” (Al-Jazeera) or “Malawi’s Banda […]
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Dignity in la-la land: Why anybody can’t paint anybody’s penis
By Leonhard Praeg We all know that political liberals live in a la-la land that hovers, somewhat like a virtual reality, over the real geography of political time and space. For citizens of la-la land “freedom of expression” is the same in South Africa as it is in Zimbabwe as it is in New Zealand, […]
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Tackling President Zuma
Not for the first time, the country was brought almost to a standstill by its president’s membrum virile. Only this time it wasn’t because the polygamous president had unsafe intercourse with the HIV positive daughter of a close friend; nor was he caught in adultery with another comrade’s daughter. It was not the revelation of […]