By Cano Ssemakalu It can be tough being a foreigner in South Africa, even if you are here legally. I have lived here for seven years now, during which I’ve been treated like a South African by the very generous government and its people. But my grievance is with the corporations in the private sector […]
Lifestyle
Posted inLifestyle
The weight of fatherhood
No, this won’t be some swollen tome on the gravity of parenthood. It won’t be some heavy words, wrung from worried hands, on the seriousness of fatherly duty. That stuff is all fine, a walk in the park, the kids are gonna be fine. The weight I want to speak of is the ounces and […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
Nonhle and the Saab
So Nonhle Thema drives a Saab. We know this because she tweeted about it today, twice. To whit: “My SAAB was custom made for me.No one else has it General Motors did this for me a gift ” and “And my car was half a mill…thank u General Motors”. 75 627 people follow Nonhle, ready to […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
Look but you can’t listen
On several occasions in the recent past I’ve bitched and moaned at the poor staff of Look & Listen, complaining about the sheer hopelessness of their jazz selection: very few of the great classics, for instance, or very spotty representation of even very-well-known artists. Sometimes a staff member says “I’ll tell the buyer,” which seems […]
Posted inLifestyle
Back to School and Back to Good Food
Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. As summer comes to an end, school is just around the corner for children across the United States. For children enrolled in state schools, this typically means the return of unhealthy lunches that are best described as “fast food”: hamburgers, chicken nuggets, fried snacks and sugary soft […]
Posted inLifestyle
Divorce: Yes, there is an upside
Over the past couple of days I’ve had conversations with two straight male friends of mine. One is going through an acrimonious and horribly expensive divorce; the other is a serial dater looking unsuccessfully for love. I always like to lend a sympathetic ear and an ergonomic shoulder, and I’ve come out of the experience […]
Posted inLifestyle
Waiting for Gusto
Since first we dragged our wet, half-baked selves from the primordial soup — limp croutons tired of swimming — and pulled air into our hard-won lungs, humans have worshipped food. Whether as a simple set of sugars, proteins and amino acids that allow our metabolic engine to go about the business of combustion, or the […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Why I won’t be at Slutwalk
Nechama Brodie’s column left me cold, fuming and insulted, and that’s the version without the French. I followed her conversation with a few people on Twitter on Sunday and already expected an understandably defensive argument. I did not, however, expect her to equate disagreement with “a stranger groping my breasts in a club, because I […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
‘Calling it Slutwalk has made it the success it is’
By Mvelase Peppetta When Canadian police officer Michael Sanguinetti said “don’t dress like a slut”, he’d made a huge mistake. In fact he’d touched that rock the women who’d made their way up to the Union Buildings in 1956 had warned against. Sanguinetti’s words, uttered a few months ago when giving university students safety tips, […]
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Coming out of the granny closet
Today I had a powerful flashback to the single most awful, humiliating moment in the entire awful, humiliating process that was the implosion of my life after I was retrenched from my job in Sydney in November 2008. It was at a dinner party more than a year ago. We were about to pile into […]
Posted inLifestyle
The sustainability farce
By Mark Peach Sustainability in a developing country should surely be concerned with more than recycling, nature preservation, endangered species and sources of energy. Important as these are, they are almost irrelevant to people barely living and in horrific conditions. Yet many in the sustainability industry moan that they are unable to “engage” the poor […]
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Born at the right time: Celebrating Antoinette
What would you pay for an evening in the company of Lebo Mashile and Don Matera – two of our country’s most gifted wordsmiths? I recently had such an evening at the home of Pitika and Antoinette Ntuli on July 30 2011. Pitika is a world renowned South African sculptor, poet and intellectual. Antoinette Ntuli, […]