By Matthew Beetar If Monty Python were still in business they would need look no further than the University of KwaZulu-Natal for material. The absurdity of the management of the institution, ironically pitched to be “inspiring greatness”, has reached a new level of disregard for the staff and students. The coping mechanism of laughing instead […]
General
Posted inGeneral
They lied to us
By Zamantungwa Khumalo We’ve been sold the idea that we can chase our dreams, that we can carpe diem through life, that we can drop out of varsity and be the next Zuckerberg. The reality on the ground isn’t as rosy. The people who tell you to chase your dreams won’t tell you how you’ll […]
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Woman gives birth to child
When my wife Michelle gave birth to our first child, Aidan, last year, I learned some things about the world. I learned that nature doesn’t take prisoners. That labour wards are only pragmatic places, designed to extract one human being from another. And that every news headline, every day, should read ”Woman gives birth to […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle, Media
The shopping mall as consumer architecture
Referring to the moment, in Plato’s Symposium, where the lover supposedly beholds a completely disembodied, atemporal “beauty”, in the process conforming to the character of this abstraction, Kaja Silverman says (World Spectators, 2000: 10): “This deindividuation of the look represents a crucial feature of the process through which Socrates negates phenomenal forms. This is because […]
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South Africa’s culture of mediocrity
South Africa’s primary and secondary education system is breeding a culture of mediocrity and entitlement that will ultimately undermine the growth of the country, both socially and economically. This culture of entitlement is not simply limited to the education system however, but has been surreptitiously reappropriated by our rights-based discourse so that it has become […]
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Zuma to transfer Lulu and Oscar to Manchester United
Every time an English Premier League prima donna gets left out of an important game or is criticised by his boss the media goes tilt trying to figure out when he will be sold, for how much and to whom. A good case in point being Wayne Rooney who was benched for the vital Champions […]
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Do women have to champion other women’s causes
By Melo Magolego The interwebs are abuzz with Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer asking all staff that work from home to start reporting to the office. Those affected include middle-class mothers for whom the flexibility of working from home had afforded the opportunity to lead more balanced lives — to be both mothers and career […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Guns, patriarchy and violence against women
In Ridley Scott’s (for a male director) astonishingly feminist film, Thelma and Louise (1991), there is a scene-sequence that graphically captures the indissoluble connection between patriarchal men and guns. And, at the same time, it shows how much the vaunted power of patriarchal men depends on their guns. The scene-sequence commences at that point in […]
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Fellow Muslims, don’t be silenced by the extremists
By Sumaya Hendricks The pursuit of being a devout Muslim who strives to embody the values, personality and mission of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is inextricably interconnected with practising fairness, justice, kindness, peace and other moral superlatives. As Muslims in the 21st century, who are blessed with enormous potential and opportunity, it […]
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Actually, we can solve our crime problem
By Niki Moore At 4am on Thursday morning I woke up to find a shadowy stranger standing next to my bed, bending over my bedside table. The figure was silhouetted against the streetlight coming in from my window — an unfamiliar male shape with a rucksack in his back — and I sat up in […]
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Young white South Africans…where are you?
By Janet Jobson I never imagined that one of the biggest challenges I would face this year would be how to get young white South Africans interested in joining a network of young leaders driving public innovation. It had simply never occurred to me that it would be difficult. After all, my whole life I’ve […]
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The discourses directing our actions
During a discussion at a staff seminar today one of the participants, who teaches public administration, was explaining to the rest of us that in his research on, broadly speaking, the communication between government officials (including ministers) and ordinary citizens comprising various constituencies, he constantly comes across communicational gaps — between the documents released by […]