General

As South Africans celebrate Women’s Day, the contribution of great women are often heralded and echoed across the nation, and rightly so. It is only fitting that we, as a nation, mark the immeasurable sacrifices and suffering of leading women in our society. The names of Lilian Ngoyi, Mamphela Rampele, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, Adelaide […]

Journalism is usually, and I believe accurately, associated with the uncovering and reporting of “facts”. Investigative journalism, especially, involves the (sometimes difficult, even dangerous) ferreting out of “facts” that are not generally known, and often deliberately hidden or covered up, especially by those in power. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for example, will be remembered […]

Picking a sports side is always an interesting venture. Apart from it being an exercise of tactics and planning, there is also the toughest facet of all when it comes to forming a competitive outfit: the human dynamic. History tells us a group of people that have spent a certain period of time around one […]

A lot of the law around children requires ordinary citizens who know about child abuse or molestation to report it. It is in fact illegal to know about this stuff and not report it — if you don’t report, you are complicit. This makes sense in some respects, and some respects it doesn’t. Obviously it […]

It’s Telkom Charity Cup time again where Absa Premiership teams, as voted for by their supporters, will take part in a four-team, one-day tournament in the name of charity. But don’t be fooled by the word charity, when the teams take the field they are not charitable at all. It becomes an all-out battle for […]

If you are in the 30-plus age bracket, chances are, you will not see Zimbabwe rise again in your lifetime. Now before you accuse me of being an unfeeling pessimist, I am not by any means suggesting that Zimbabwe will never recover. I am merely asserting that a return to the former glory days is […]

If you are in the 30-plus age bracket, chances are, you will not see Zimbabwe rise again in your lifetime. Now before you accuse me of being an unfeeling pessimist, I am not by any means suggesting that Zimbabwe will never recover. I am merely asserting that based on the multi-faceted dynamics which have shaped […]

Once upon a time in a land at the southern tip of Africa, there lived a people so adept at making the rest of the world scratch their heads until their hair fell out that it became known as the Kingdom of Alopecia. Like most countries on the continent it had undergone a period of […]

“To be or not to be, that is the question” that confronted Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy of the same name. Hamlet is confronted with two important considerations, which pose to him a predicament of sorts; whether to reprimand his mother or protect her; to love Ophelia or reject her; to kill Claudius or […]

Part of the challenge of writing for a wider public is resisting being provoked into knee-jerk responses to attacks on what you have written. Sometimes it is OK to simply let contrary viewpoints go by unchallenged, even when they are palpably ill-founded. At other times, though, remaining silent is not an option, and the latest […]

Often anti-Zionist and Israeli apologists when arguing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, behave like toddlers on a playground needing parental supervision. There are those who vehemently defend the actions of Israel regardless of the atrocities it commits. According to their logic Israel is protecting its “right to exist” (**rolls eyes**). This is while anti-Zionists also condone […]