Jobs influence who we are and our relations with others. In most societies, jobs are a fundamental source of self-respect and social identity. Jobs also connect people with others through networks. The workplace can be a place to encounter new ideas and information and to interact with people of different cultures and ethnicities. The distribution […]
News/Politics
Posted inNews/Politics
School kids pay the cost of political schizophrenia
The African National Congress is inclined towards self-defeating behaviour. Nowhere has this political schizophrenia been as glaring as in the government’s inability to deliver a sound basic education. The right to education is a cornerstone of the Freedom Charter, the founding document of the modern ANC. Appropriately so, since there is a surfeit of research […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why I no longer tell my brother to wear his pants properly
Saggy pants is a popular form of displaying rebellion to teenage respectability by young men who wear their trousers far down their waists, often times generously exposing their underwear. Saggy pants are mostly associated with black male masculinity, which has been highlighted by the imagery often associated with mainstream hip-hop culture. Of course today this […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Stateless: Protecting the right to nationality
By Jessica P George Recent and upcoming changes to the law on citizenship and birth registration in South Africa show that there is still a long way to go to protect the right to nationality. Some recent amendments in fact create new barriers to nationality and exacerbate statelessness — when a person is not recognised […]
Posted inNews/Politics
SA conclave to elect leaders
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a 76-year-old Argentine, was elected as the 266th pope which has occasioned an outpouring of unfettered joy from the world’s Catholic community and, let’s face it, no-little pride among South Americans who are happily basking in his glory this morning. What has this got to do with South Africa? Anyone? That’s […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Give Francis a chance
The amount of anger that seems to have poured out as a result of the election of the new pope has left me feeling both slightly confused and a little pissed off. As a Catholic (who doesn’t go to church very often) the very people who would object to all people of a single group […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
SA a key player in regional trade and development
South Africa has succeeded to reinsert its economy back into world trade following a long period of internal political difficulties and international reactions to the apartheid regime. The ratio of trade in goods and services to GDP rose from 41% in 1994 to 53% in 2011, indicating that the international exchange of goods and services […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The hypocrisy of the ‘apartheid Israel’ boycott movement
For the past nine years the International Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has organised a well-funded, internationally co-ordinated hate fest against Israel in more than 250 university cities around the world. The event aims to classify Israel as an apartheid state, thereby delegitimising its right to exist because apartheid is a crime against humanity. […]
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 […]
Posted inNews/Politics
My Little Pony in the spaghetti bolognese
It started in the United Kingdom, spread to South Africa, and has just hit America. It’s a wave of popular revulsion at finding that some of those tasty beef products from the local supermarket are actually stuffed with horsemeat. There have been arrests and high-level food agency investigations. Stores have withdrawn entire lines of burgers, […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Any room for Afrikaners in the new South Africa?
About two months ago I wrote a light-hearted post (on my blog) about the South African language I considered to be the sexiest. The post was written for a limited audience and was not intended as social commentary. I rated Afrikaans fourth and said — in jest of course — that “unfortunately, Afrikaans is burdened […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Europeans must leave South Africa!
For ages, the country today known as South Africa was no more than a loose band of separate communities. The Nguni tribes, which settled on the Southern tip of Africa around the 10th century, neither considered themselves a single nation, nor did they consider the Khoisan people already inhibiting the area part of their collective. […]