On Tuesday, this post appeared concerning race on the Rhodes University SRC Facebook page: The post was presumably inspired by the recent issues surrounding UCT and the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, as well as the calls to change the name of Rhodes University. The post gathered hundreds of comments of those either militantly in […]
News/Politics
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The Rhodes statue, a swastika and so much offence
Yesterday, after a week of protesting at the University of Cape Town, anti-Rhodes statue activists placed swastikas and photographs of Adolf Hitler on buildings at the university. They claimed (after the fact, it must be noted) that these posters were put up to conscientise students to the offence that the statue of Rhodes represents. One […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Rhodes University needs a new name
By Welcome Mandla Lishivha The recent incident at the University of Cape Town with students protesting to have the statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed from their campus has sparked debates among Rhodes University students. The discussion about changing the university’s name has resurfaced, at least among students, and the university can’t ignore this discussion […]
Posted inNews/Politics
What’s with the heavy-handed crackdown on free speech in Swaziland?
By Caroline James Remembering Thulani Maseko and Bheki Makhubu — one year on… Can you remember what you were doing 365 days ago? It was the day after St Patrick’s Day, so that might jog some memories, but for most of us, it was just another day. For Thulani Maseko, Bheki Makhubu and their families, […]
Posted inEquality, General, Media, News/Politics
Airbrushing history: Debating Rhodes’ legacy
As the debate raged in Cape Town over whether to remove the statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, I found myself in a grand house named after him some 6 000 miles away. Rhodes House is the quaint Oxford-based headquarters of the Rhodes scholarships. Named for and funded by Rhodes, the scholarships are awarded annually […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Becoming a man…and losing something on the way
By Olga Bialostocka As South Africa celebrates the first, successful penis transplant in the world, with much-deserved public awe, the question we should ask is why there’s a demand for this sort of specialist treatment. The results of the medical efforts of Stellenbosch University surgeons should be praised but the reasons why young men lose […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Simone Gbagbo: International justice v national justice
By Angela Mudukuti Is justice for egregious international crimes best served at the national domestic level or at the International Criminal Court (ICC)? The March 9 2015 domestic conviction and sentencing of Ivory Coast’s former first lady, Simone Gbagbo, has raised this and other important questions. Wanted by the ICC for her role in the […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Is there anybody there, beneath the trolling shit?
In 2014 I had a troll who wouldn’t leave me alone. He wrote hundreds of words about me without having ever met me. This troll painted a distorted picture of who I was, while hiding behind the safe anonymity of a non-descript picture and made-up name. He responded to my writing with outrage, and people […]
Posted inGender violence, General, News/Politics
Why I criticise the government, intombazane and other degrees of equality
As someone recently told me, “it’s very easy to criticise the government”. That is true, but deserves further thought. The reality is that this is exactly what our current political dispensation fought for. The lives lost, families torn apart and the blood shed was all done in the hope of creating the very freedoms that […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
What ‘war’ means today
When picking up Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude – War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin, 2006), again, in the light of recent developments across the globe involving Syria, Isis, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda (to mention only some of the names associated with war), I was struck, anew, by their astute identification […]
Posted inNews/Politics
ANC is lost in a fog of doublethink and doublespeak
Military theorists speak of the “fog of war”. It’s that swirling mist of uncertainty where not only the true intentions and capabilities of one’s adversaries are unclear, but so too the true measure of the resources one can deploy. The great Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz wrote that it took a particularly skilled intelligence to […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Goodbye Bantu education, hello…?
As a new mother, I spend a lot of time obsessing over the future, I wonder what my daughter’s speaking voice will sound like, whether she will be stubborn like her mother or kind and generous like her father. I think about what career she will choose and agonise over how best we can prepare […]