General

One of the questions I was asked during the Fifa Local Organising Committee’s interviews for media volunteers was about my motivation for applying to participate in the Confederations Cup. I was very honest in my response in that I saw the occasion as an opportunity to prove Afro-pessimists wrong. It was therefore heartening to note […]

Of primary importance to anyone about to venture into “new territory” is an element of “expectation”. Fifteen Fifa Local Organising Committee media volunteers in one room! What exactly do they “expect” to gain out of this experience? This question was posed as we commenced with the volunteers’ workshop, albeit in a different manner. The standard […]

For an oke who usually goes to the stadium to scream my lungs out from the stands while giving unsolicited coaching instructions, the match between Bafana Bafana and Norway was a completely “unique” experience. For the first time I had to watch a football match from the perspective of an “organiser”, rather than a “spectator”. […]

Mr Mpshe needs to be reminded of a little fact about South Africans this week — we are not a people born of cowards, nor men who place personal ambitions above what needs to be done for the people. We are born of men who stood up when it was more comfortable and beneficial to […]

I have since August 2005 had to climb into the open sewer of personality politics — at first without public demonstration, and then latterly, since August 2007, with overt and public demonstration — for the express purpose of sensitising community leaders about ethical leadership and honest corporate and public governance. Perhaps it was my egomania […]

So I’ve mended my heathenish ways and started going back to church again. After last year’s less than happy encounter with low church Anglicanism, I found another church more to my liking, more traditional — so much so that I have joined the choir. So far I am enjoying going to church more than I […]

I’m writing as a Canadian who has made South Africa my home on and off for the past 8 years. I’ve been made to feel welcome by most, but there have been some xenophobic remarks directed at me. They usually come from middle-class South Africans who don’t wish to hear any critique of their country […]

Shortly after the 2006 World Cup in Germany, a team of Fifa heavyweights visited the hosts of the next edition of the tournament in order to lay down the rules. South Africa, they told us, does not own the 2010 World Cup. Rather, it belongs to global football’s governing body and the international football community. […]

Being in the New Space Theatre for the first time since the old New Space closed nearly three decades ago — and only hours after reading Sandile Memela’s indictment of supposedly racist Cape theatre — had me wondering about his diatribe and the state of protest theatre right now. (Yes, I know, what protest theatre? […]

Every great multinational sports match, from annual events such as Formula 1, the Super 14 and TriNations, the Uefa Champions League soccer, the tennis Grand Slam and the barrage of golf tournaments, to quadrennial events such as the Olympics, the Rugby World Cup and the Soccer World Cup, has long been tainted by the stain […]

Religion and those who make a living out of pandering its simplistic and defunct notions are unable to stay out of our bedrooms it seems. The Pope has recently hit headlines again with his decree that HIV “cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”. People like to have sex. […]

“Julius Malema is a bit of an idiot,” claimed Jonathan Griffiths, a cartoonist and Rhodes student, while waiting outside the General Lecture Theatre for the 5pm lecture by ANC Youth League national chairman Julius Malema at Rhodes University on Thursday March 19. By 4.45pm already, dozens of students were gathered at the entrance of the […]