We hate refugees. We burn them out of their homes. We chase them away. We burn down their businesses. We tell them go back to where you came from. Bloody refugees. We really don’t like them. So when Helen Zille comes here and tells us that kids from the Eastern Cape are refugees, we get […]
General
Posted inGeneral
Oppression, disabilities and our children
Long, long ago we knew we needed words for what is truly precious in the times of oppression — and there were, and will be, many times. No one knows how, but we fashioned the following word: 滫. We took one of the characters for water, 氵and added to that a character used for the […]
Posted inGeneral, Media
Self-publish and be damned? Yeah, right
There have been a lot of comment pieces in the past couple of months about why self-publishing your own novel is a very bad thing. They’ve appeared in newspapers and on the kind of websites where the authors have their own photos and full biographies at the end of each article they write. Almost without […]
Posted inGeneral
Africa is not a movie script
By Takura Zhangazha American and Hollywood celebrities are great to watch in the popular movies and television series that are now available on many African TV channels. In recent years, like celebrity sportspersons, they have also become involved with international humanitarian organisations (such as Unicef) to increase global awareness of the many disasters that afflict […]
Posted inGeneral
Death of a school friend
The first time I encountered Robert Jackson, as a seven-year-old in the Sandown Primary School playground, I hit him in the teeth and made him howl. This was ironic in that during our respective school careers I was a first-class wuss whereas Rob had a reputation as something of a fighter. The second irony was […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
MDG target for water met but our taps still run dry
A United Nations and World Health Organisation report released last week (South Africa’s national water week) has claimed a near victory in achieving one of the most important Millennium Development Goals: making drinking water accessible to millions of the poor. According to the report, titled Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation 2012, “over two billion […]
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CPA will present contact centre challenges and opportunities
Now that the Consumer Protection Act is in effect, companies must have a strong grip on their customer interactions, information flow and document management. When disputes arise with customers, it is up to the company to provide full records of the interaction, whether that be in the form of a contact centre call recordings, email […]
Posted inGeneral
The schoolboy rugby market
Things have certainly changed. A monster called professionalism, coupled with marketing and brand image, is getting in the way of education and causing a beast to mature at a worrying rate. Unfortunately I believe this issue in schoolboy rugby has simply gone too far, and regional school principals, rugby unions and SA Rugby must reach […]
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Foucault on the functioning of discourse in society
If Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers are right (and I believe they are), one is never outside of countervailing power relations in society, which means that, ineluctably, one is always enmeshed in multilayered, overlapping grids of discourses that function in an ambivalent manner to enable, and simultaneously control, direct, disseminate and domesticate human action and […]
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Vernon Philander: the next great South African orator
As South Africans we are far too quick to credit people from overseas with brilliance in a particular field while condemning any local who dares to stand on the brink of greatness. How often, for example, do you hear academics and the media going on and on about wonderful speakers like Winston Churchill, Martin Luther […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Too Much Information: Where does it all go?
In an age where identity theft is rife, it is increasingly difficult to reconcile the fact that almost everywhere you go in the country, one is expected to provide detailed and quite crucial information about yourself. Moving between the National Library and a university library, over several weeks recently, I had to provide my identity […]
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Equating abortion with infanticide is a red herring
The abortion debate was rocked by a recent article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in the Journal of Medical Ethics. It argued that infanticide should be permitted by law for the same reason that abortion is permitted, which is to say that a foetus and a newborn baby are not human persons with rights. Giubilini and Minerva argue […]