As so excellently written, Adam Wakefield has looked into 2011 and summed up for us all the poignant moments and prestigious awards handed out to very deserving recipients. It’s a wonderful article and I urge you to read it whilst on this site. I look at our national sports as well as the provincial or […]
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Despite Nobel prizes, the time has yet to come for Liberia’s women
Obaa oh… this is our time. Obaa oh… this is our time. Oh, woman oh… this is our time! Oh, woman oh… this is our time! As I sat in the Spektrum Theater at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in downtown Oslo watching the glistening red, yellow, blue and green lights on the stage and […]
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Alain Badiou, the “event”, and political subjectivity
Alain Badiou, whose work is, as far as I can tell, not widely known in the English-speaking world – where Peter Hallward has done a lot to compensate for this lack – is a contemporary thinker who has done much to refine the philosophical understanding of the human subject. As Hallward observes (in the Translator’s […]
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The Alternative 2011 Awards
With 2011 done and dusted, it’s time for some cheer to be spread among those sportsman and suits who, in a nutshell, didn’t say “The boys are disappointed” when asked how they felt about losing: We will miss you award (if he is not reappointed) Peter de Villiers – While not everyone’s cup of tea, […]
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Christmas? They’re trying to kill off Jeremy Clarkson
Mrs Traps is outraged at the fact that this Christmas, her favourite time of year, she has seen very few television programmes celebrating the holiday. Despite being Jewish she loves the carols and all the other festivities that Christians traditionally employ to remember their saviour. On Christmas Day she normally serves up her famous ‘Turkey […]
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The making of Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Laureate
by Robtel Neajai Pailey In 2009 I screened the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell in Monrovia, Liberia, with a group of Liberian women — young and old — and found myself buoyed by an unconventional story portraying unconventional women in very unconventional circumstances. Two years I am now revisiting the film after it […]
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Proteas undergoing epoch change
It has been 20 years since South Africa re-entered international cricket when they played India in Calcutta on November 10 1991, in what was the country’s first ODI. Two of the men who played in that match, Andrew Hudson and Allan Donald, are now intimately involved with the current Proteas set-up. Hudson heads up the selection […]
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Executions and fear in China
Daily I take a 45-minute bus trip to the school I teach at in Che Feng (pronounced something like chaw fa-ang). The place is an eye-opener in terms of poverty and beauty. Where I get on is a relatively “posh” area by Chinese standards. Though there is still a lot of poverty there are plenty […]
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11 things I am grateful for
It was, quite simply, unthinkable. Not even the most paranoid would lie awake at night worrying about it, and yet it happened. A woman stepped into a lift in New York City, as millions of people do every day. Only this time, she got her foot caught in the gap between the lift car and […]
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Cloud PBX changes face of telecoms market
Things change, sometimes very quickly and not always out in the open. So it is with hosted or cloud PBX solutions. Since BMI-TechKnowledge published the latest South African PBX market report (April 2011), there has been a marked growth of cloud solution models and vendors in this space, pointing to an increasing need to accommodate […]
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Thank God for Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, author, journalist, master debater and razor-sharp intellectual has died. His passing was accompanied by an almost audible sigh of collective relief from the many hapless individuals that encountered him in debate while he lived. You could search long and hard for a sharper tongue driven by a more insightful, enormous brain for all […]
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‘Racism without races’
In the late eighties French thinker Etienne Balibar wrote an essay in which he considered the question of “neo-racism”, that is, a form of racism that is distinct from earlier models. Balibar’s point of departure is a description of racism as inscribing itself in “practices (forms of violence, contempt, intolerance, humiliation and exploitation), in discourses […]