Once upon a time, e-tolls galvanised society. Like no other cause before or since, the hatred of e-tolls cut across class, politics and race. They were a superb nation-building tool, something I reflected on here. But things have changed. When e-tolls were finally implemented in early December, the battle was lost. Quite possibly the war, […]
General
Posted inEquality, General, Media, News/Politics
Be cruel to be cruel
It is May 1968. Raging in the streets of Paris, the (in)famous student uprisings. On the walls of the Sorbonne a slogan appears: “SOYONS CRUELS!” / “BE CRUEL!” Someone comes up to you and asks: “Have you seen this writing on the wall? What is it telling me to do?” Cruelty, by which I mean […]
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No love at Rhodes University?
There’s a widely used quote by Martin Niemöller that I love: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for […]
Posted inEquality, General, Lifestyle, News/Politics
Yes, but do we live human dignity?
Much has been said, is still being said and will continue to be said about the reconstitution of the South African legal, political and, perhaps most importantly, ethical order on the basis of the ideal of human dignity. This reconstitution of course took place and form by way of the adoption of the post-apartheid Constitutions […]
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Body politics: A weighty issue
“You’re so fat” are words I began to hear a lot when I was a teenager. When I was in grade 10, I bumped into a girl I hadn’t seen since grade seven. She was shocked to see the netball player who had been her opponent transformed into a blob of flesh stuffed into a […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Living in present-day South Africa
I don’t believe in generalisations when it comes to experience, except in the natural sciences. In fact, philosopher Hans Reichenbach, in The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, goes so far as to claim that “generalisation” is what is distinctive about science – in the language of the philosophy of science, it is science’s “demarcation criterion”. Because […]
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‘The Giver’ and the listener
“Others pull you down because they’re beneath you already.” Fifteen-year-old Melikhaya Mdubeki explains to the group as we walk up the rutted road in Imizamo Yethu in Hout Bay. He’s one of the star pupils of the Lalela Project, an arts education programme aimed at children living in extreme poverty. “Oh wow,” says the movie […]
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Bhutan’s lesson for the world
Reading Sipho Kings’s important article on Bhutan, “Forget your GDP, come on get happy” yesterday sent me back to my old TIME-magazines to find an article by Bobby Ghosh (TIME, October 15, 2012) on this tiny country wedged between India and China. The reason why I remembered Ghosh’s article is that it was entitled “This […]
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Christmas: The time for hard questions
Christmas is about over indulgence and over familiarity. A time when those who have known you the longest come back into your life and try and update the knowledge they had on you from the last time you met. What this in turn means is that this is a time of year when all the […]
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How I got Bert le Clos to sing for me
Last Friday I spent more than R4 500 of my own money to get four seconds of swimming star Chad le Clos’s father Bert le Clos singing for this video. I phoned Bert, booked a flight to Durban, went down the next day, hired a car, drove to Pinetown, missed my turn, found Bert, got the […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Nelson, nostalgia and the nation
By Nedine Moonsamy In South Africa, we’ve never had an easy time with nostalgia. For some citizens being nostalgic about the past is often tied to the guilt of a privileged, white childhood. For others it holds the concern about whether nostalgia glamorises the indignity of poverty under apartheid. In both cases we censor our […]
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What the Samurai can teach the world about a truly human ethos
What does it mean for a people, or a nation (the two are not necessarily synonymous) to have a fulfilling ethos? By ethos (on which I’ve written here before) I mean broadly the distinctive cultural and social character of a group of people as manifested in their collective and individual activities, which are therefore expressive […]