Imagine if you could communicate clearly and easily with people no matter which country in the world you were visiting. Imagine if everybody was on an equal footing when it came to expressing their ideas and opinions. Imagine if language was something that united all of humanity instead of a hurdle we had to cross […]
Lifestyle
Posted inLifestyle
Boerewors and chopsticks: interviews with the Chinese (Janet)
When I write about China, I prefer to keep the topics at a grass-roots level. This is the first in a series of interviews with Chinese people in Shanghai. The first is my 26-year-old Chinese teacher and friend, Wei Qian, English name Janet. Her parents, from Sichuan province, grew up in the Cultural Revolution and […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
With no ANC, it is a very cold, cold world!
It is suspected that the threat or fear of losing position, power, status and material wealth is what could have motivated so-called ANC ‘dissidents’ to jump ship. They must have felt that it is heroic to jump into the deep blue sea rather than to wait to be pushed over to the sharks. You see, […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media, News/Politics, Sport
How little has changed. How much has changed
Now that my loved ones are safely in another country, I feel free to return to record the facts, fables, foibles and fantasies of surviving in South Africa. I put blogging on TL on the back-burner eight months ago after threats on my life and my children from supporters of Jacob Zuma. My landlord has […]
Posted inLifestyle
New TRC enquiry needed: “corporal punishment” in SA schools
In South African schools “corporal punishment” was not only allowed, it was encouraged. The term is a euphemism filled with denial. The reality was beating the living daylights out of bewildered male children and violating their vulnerable, private space in a sensual manner that bordered on rape. As a result I lived much of my […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
African Renaissance’s half-baked ‘Native Experts’
It would seem the greatest waste of time in post-1994 society is to try to find logic why white political strategists, advertising gurus and marketing experts are considered native experts, especially by hoodwinked indigenous African people. After all, they neither speak African languages nor have an intuitive connection to grassroots people. The fact that white […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
Global meltdown: China’s a cool place to stay
On the whole, mainland Chinese people just don’t do debt. During this global meltdown I visited a Chinese friend’s Korean restaurant the other day in Nanhui, the somewhat rural end of Shanghai, which is an hour and a half commute from where I live. As I walked through the door just before lunch rush hour […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
What would happen if you took Oprah’s advice …
… about everything? The First Lady of talk-show television is always offering words of wisdom — on her show, on her website and through her magazine. What would happen if you took these tips? How would you live, what would you spend your money on, what movies would you see, what books would you read, […]
Posted inLifestyle
‘The problem with all you bloody white Sawth Effricens …’
“The problem with all you bloody white Sawth Effricens is that yer all racist but yer’ve all got black blood in you,” Hamish the British journalist cheerily announced to me in Long Bar, a pub with a truly colonial feel to it on West Nanjing Road in Shanghai, near where I live. I winced and […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media
A nightmare called Nedbank
Nedbank will likely deny this till the cows come home, but the truth is they pocketed a large sum from my company 10 days ago and wouldn’t give it back until, in desperation, I asked my journalist wife to rattle their cage. Suddenly, things started to happen. Which raises the question: if you don’t have […]
Posted inLifestyle
The Friendly City – wine, women and calm
I can’t get over seeing amaXhosa do manual labour; I just cannot get over it. To the Sumo, a boitjie born and bred in the lush bosom of the KwaZulu-Natal’s North Coast and exposure to amaXhosa strictly limited to what I saw on TV (Government officials and celebrity personalities) and heard (through the folklore which […]
Posted inLifestyle
Tannie-style kissing takes off
Who would have thought it? Lip-on-lip kissing, normally associated with ooms and tannies and oumas, has become fashionable in London. “On the party scene, air kissing — that horrible ‘mwah, mwah’ used by the kind of people who know your job title and dress size but forget your name – is out,” noted the Daily […]