In photography, time-lapse exposures are a useful mechanism to make imperceptible changes unreel with new clarity before the eye. Similarly, for a journalist, a series of sequential exposures to a situation can make gradual social changes suddenly obvious in a way that microscopic study does not. After a long absence from Zimbabwe, where I used […]
News/Politics
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Trayvon Martin: It’s about race and a lousy law
Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager, was shot dead in Florida a month ago because of how he looked. Before being killed by a Hispanic self-appointed crime watch volunteer, Martin was described as “suspicious”. George Zimmerman was suspicious due to Martin’s skin colour, his wearing of a hoodie with the hood up (it was raining), […]
Posted inNews/Politics
South Africa needs a new national myth
I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately. The young tech entrepreneurs and artists I met at Culture Shift. The 40-something filmmaker, writer and consultant I first encountered at an idea orgy (where ideas mate to produce new ideas). The marketing guru inspired by the potential for technology to inspire new social movements. The […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Senegal’s democratic leap forward
“Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.” When Senegal’s former president Abdoulaye Wade prophetically coined this saying years ago, he definitely didn’t have the 25th of March 2012 in his mind as the day when he would unceremoniously “snap”. The 85-year-old was trounced by […]
Posted inBusiness, General, News/Politics
Fighting for black gold in Africa: Liberians approach oil finds with caution
by Robtel Neajai Pailey News released at the end of February that Liberia was on the cusp of an unprecedented oil discovery garnered much more than just praise and adulation. Listservs and websites lit up one by one with lightening speed. Liberians reacted like rabid bulldogs frothing at the mouth, barking at the Liberian government, […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
South Africa, the Rome Statute, Zimbabwe and torture
By Clare Ballard “Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.” – Wendell Phillips So accustomed have we become to reports of atrocities in war-ravaged, post colonial Africa that I believe we’d be forgiven for associating the term ‘impunity’ with the perpetrators of these crimes, even though the nature of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zuma’s protectors at one another’s throats
Donning a jaunty Ché beret doth not a soldier make, as the wannabe revolutionaries of the African National Congress Youth League recently discovered, when the real fighters highlighted the difference. The uMkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) in KwaZulu-Natal lashed the ANCYL’s embattled leader, saying “If it was still the struggle era, Julius Malema would […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, General, News/Politics
Drilling Africa’s Arctic
The Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest Unesco World Heritage Site, is situated along the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. It contains more species of mammals, reptiles and birds than any other protected area on the continent. It has an exceptional diversity of landscapes stretching from the glaciers of the […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Sharpeville: Shame on you, ANC
Moving the commemoration of the Sharpeville massacre from its historic base is nothing more than an insult to those who laid down their lives. For the past 21 years, Sharpeville Day, as the day was known, was celebrated in Sharpeville, the place where 69 people lost their lives fighting for the freedoms and liberties we […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The real cause of our constitutional crisis
By Ian Dewar At the end of the explanatory memorandum to the fully amended Constitution on the info.gov.za website our Constitution is described thus: “This Constitution therefore represents the collective wisdom of the South African people and has been arrived at by general agreement.” Now, nearly sixteen years since its promulgation, there is little evidence […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
MDG target for water met but our taps still run dry
A United Nations and World Health Organisation report released last week (South Africa’s national water week) has claimed a near victory in achieving one of the most important Millennium Development Goals: making drinking water accessible to millions of the poor. According to the report, titled Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation 2012, “over two billion […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Please, no God: not in our courts, not in Parliament, not in government
One of the great ironies of organised religions is that their adherents can only live in peace within a secular state. Those states that embrace a faith are usually at war with themselves or at war with others. Where governments adopt religion, they tend to corrupt and pervert that religion until it becomes something almost […]