I grew up in a village outside Polokwane in Limpopo. At school and in the community we would always hear older boys talking about lepanta. As a young boy, I knew lepanta to be a Sotho word for “belt”. I soon learnt that it was coined by boys in the street corners to mean “when […]
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Peter de Villiers is his own worst enemy
Peter de Villiers just can’t stay away from the news. After four years as Springbok coach, culminating in the Springboks’ defeat by the Wallabies in Wellington, the man from Paarl left the international coaching scene. After a few months on the sidelines, De Villiers emerged from his exile to again lambaste the performance of referee Bryce Lawrence […]
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Just pay the tolls goddamnit!
E-tolling, the practice of the government extracting yet more money out of the good citizens of Gauteng via their love of the motor vehicle, reaches fever pitch yet again today. The Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance is going to court to get an urgent interdict to stop the implementation of the system on April 30. […]
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E-tolls: Walking is, well, the way forward
I sincerely hope Cosatu marches those e-toll gates back into the earth where they came from next week. I really do. If there is one protest specialist capable of pulling it off it’s Zwelinzima Vavi and his red army. But I don’t think they’ll succeed. Not even with two million people. Looking at the size […]
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Apartheid nostalgia, education and agency
By Athambile Masola The media coverage about the shambolic state of education in South Africa (with a recent focus on the Eastern Cape) is disturbing. The views vacillate between inspiring hope for change and declaring doom over the future of the thousands of young people whose right to basic education is being flouted in the […]
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Reclaiming the term ‘rape survivor’
There are times when silence is more eloquent and expressive than shouts of protest, or words spoken in the face of ignorance. The Silent Protest seeks to embody this silence in solidarity with rape survivors who, for whatever reason, are not able to speak out about the violence exerted on them and their bodies. The […]
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The ANC is not a broad church but a narrow cult
One of the most frightening episodes of my entire life was the time when, years ago, as a young man, I got sucked into a bizarre fanatical religious cult. No, I’m not talking about the Dutch Reformed Church. Neither am I referring to Facebook. Neither of these organisations were quite as demented as the particular […]
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Get me to the Gautrain on time
So I need to travel to Cape Town. Just for a day, to give a talk to a school on social media. I might squeeze in a couple of other meetings to make the most of the fact that I’m there. At most, booking a flight should take me five minutes, right? As it turns […]
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Economic injustice against the people
The growing divide between rich and poor in South Africa reveals the fault lines of a much broader divide – in fact, a global divide – between what one may describe as “the people” and the anonymous world of money (even if this world is often hidden behind identifiable agents, such as politicians). This was […]
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The battle for the heart and soul of a new world order
The naïve amongst us really believed that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala stood a fighting chance at landing the World Bank presidency. The realists and the cynics knew that the whole thing was but a mere charade. As things eventually turned out, the decision had already been made. If anything, the formality of going through the election process […]
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Top tips for converting online visitors
An online presence can take several forms and have any one of multiple objectives. The goal with an e-commerce website, for example, is to sell goods or services. As a run-up to a possible future sale it may wish to hook site visitors into a loyalty programme or, for other reasons, get them to […]
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Eish and goodbye: the pains of information-seeking
By Glenda Daniels Sorry, in advance, to the politically correct who support sex work and to dentists who love their jobs. But in my subjective mind, while there are many torturous jobs, these two spring to mind first: selling sex to strangers and drilling into someone’s mouth. Right up there, however, has to be an […]