News/Politics

Though it is easy to understand how the ANCYL might fail to appreciate the impact of their repeated threats to bring nationalisation to South African mining, what is incomprehensible is their continued calls for violence in Cape Town over the toilets issue when the Grabouw and Gugulethu wards clearly demonstrated that their efforts are undermining […]

The recent fracas surrounding Zapiro’s drawing of the Prophet Muhammad has predictably culminated in the usual death threats from irate Muslims. Both the cartoonist and the newspaper’s editor apparently have to die for daring to express their opinion in a theoretically free country. I think it may be worth examining both why Zapiro decided to […]

And then the ANC begat Cope which begat Cope-Lite and Cope-Cherry which all got into a Bugatti and flew overseas to spend their parliamentary allowance at Euro Disney before returning home to rejoin the ANC, DA or a partridge in a pear tree. When the Congress of the People party was formed in 2008 by […]

Two incomplete and complicit strands of thought characterise South African responses to the publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in the Mail & Guardian. The first strand of thought rooted in the Muslim community explains the offence caused by the cartoon through explaining that Islam has a problem with the depiction of […]

If you haven’t sniggered, burped or laughed at the recent Zapiro-Muslim cartoon debacle then you probably had a very pleasant weekend. Other citizens with real jobs, like the Mail & Guardian crew, fielded threats all morning on Friday from irate Muslims incensed by Zapiro’s latest offering depicting their Prophet as a psycho-case needing therapy for […]

I went to university in Durban in the mid 90s. I had a bunch of Muslim kids in my class. There were no beefs, no thoughts of “the other”. Just some other kids. There was Aisha from Zimbabwe — the chick who bounced between being a Muslim and a communist, but was always eternally hot. […]

In what is going to be considered a highly controversial move the National Press Club (NPC) on Sunday called for a meeting between Jonathan Shapiro, the Mail & Guardian and Muslim leaders to discuss the cartoon that has angered the Muslim community. According to NPC chairperson Yusuf Abramjee: “The media needs to be sensitive to […]

One foreign correspondent fancifully warned his animal-loving British readers that each game would be preceded ‘by the ritual slaughter of an animal – probably a bullock or a goat – out on the pitch’.

Like the ANCYL says, multiple concurrent partners are certainly not “fashionable” these days. HIV has made them decidedly untrendy. One thing that apparently is fashionable, however, and is getting a lot of southern African support, is homophobia. And polygamy. Goodness, that one is really hitting the headlines these days. The YL believe that Zuma is […]

Malema’s five-paragraph mea culpa is uncomfortably reminiscent of those grovelling pleadings favoured in the Communist show-trials.

In one of the most ridiculous analogies yet, Johan Lemmer, stepfather of convicted child molester Cezanne Visser who is also known as “Advocate Barbie”, has likened her plight in being forced to serve her sentence to that of anti-apartheid icon and former president Nelson Mandela. Lemmer told Beeld newspaper that “just like Mr Mandela, Cezanne […]