A Guatemalan poet, guerrilla fighter and revolutionary, Otto René Castillo, forces us as Africans to return from our retreat from the habit of thinking when he speaks to us of apolitical intellectuals of our time. Castillo says of these people: “One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the simplest of […]
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Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
The Madiba Roadshow
Reality TV is funny business. Everyone in the industry knows that you score massive ratings, sometimes even in spite of viewer scepticism, when you allow an audience a window into the so-called real day in the life of a celebrity. As spectators we have a love-hate relationship with reality television precisely because it allows us […]
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Radebe to revisit the death penalty
Virgin Active has entered me as a candidate for the South African 2013 Hurling player of the year despite the fact that I’m not Gaelic, have never held a hurley stick or hit a sliotar in my entire life. In fact the manager of the gym, Gaza, was so excited about it he came knocking […]
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Is the Sadtu strike a hail to freedom?
Khethelo Xulu As we celebrate Freedom Day in South Africa and wish to see more positive things in our country, I, as a young person, am saddened by the state of basic education, particularly in rural and townships schools. As we celebrate, we talk about sacrifices made by different people on different levels, heroines and […]
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Resisting the dehumanising architecture of the ‘space of flows’
Against the background of my previous post on “The ‘space of flows and the social elites of today”, it is illuminating to take note of Manuel Castells’s (The Rise of the Network Society, 2010: Chapter 6, Section 6) interpretation of contemporary, “postmodern” architecture as an architecture that has been redefined by the space of flows […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
On systemic lawlessness in South Africa
What we have in South Africa today is systemic lawlessness. The parking meters around the mall I often visit have not worked in more than two months. The last time I visited, everyone seemed fully aware of the malfunction, but nobody seemed to care. Some people were quite gleeful about there being free parking. Others […]
Posted inGeneral, Sport
Liverpool to retain Suarez for Crufts
Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers moved swiftly to quell any talk of serial biter Luis Suarez leaving Anfield following the striker’s attack on Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic midway through the second half of yesterday’s 2-2 draw with Chelsea. Rodgers said that as soon as the striker returned to the changeroom he had given him several smacks […]
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The ‘space of flows’ and the social elites of today
In Manuel Castells’s influential book, The Rise of the Network Society (Second edition, 2010, Chapter 6), he devotes a very revealing discussion to what he describes as the dominant spatial form of the network society, namely the “space of flows”. In his theorisation of the novel, now dominant spatial mode – the “space of flows” […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Elites who drive like taxi drivers
I find that some blacks are inclined to drive like taxi drivers irrespective of the model car they drive or their social status. It would seem that when it comes to doing the right thing on the road there is no difference between motorists from privileged suburban communities from, say, taxi drivers from the working […]
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Shocking truth about the dangers facing the rhino
If anyone were to conduct a survey on what constitutes the gravest danger to the survival of the rhinoceros in Africa the results, in all likelihood, would show that most people believe that it is the threat posed by poachers. The shocking truth, in my humble opinion, is that it is this perception which in […]
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Gandhi, Kallenbach and the controversial ‘Vaseline’ reference
Presumably some of the elderly members of the audience had no idea what the speaker was getting at when the subject of Vaseline came up in his talk on M K Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach. They, after all, belonged to a time when Vaseline was still associated with skin care rather than as a means […]
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The Trapido Diet
The government, Mrs Traps, has being going on and on at me about getting in touch with my feminine side, lovely lass from Alberton, but as soon as she found out that I had done I landed up having to sleep in the car. This from a woman who says that I’m the worst lay […]