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Based on a true story. A young girl called Melissa stared at the house across the road. She knew her friend Melody lived there and they often played together. She preferred going there instead of her own home for reasons which would take many years to understand. Her home was a sad place and her […]

Sometime in 2008, a Muslim woman clad in a hijaab (head scarf) was verbally abused in the East German city of Dresden by a German-Russian named Axel W who called her an Islamist, a slut, a terrorist and some other politically erroneous nonsense. Marwa el-Sherbini, an Egyptian national who was married and working in Germany, […]

Outcomes-based education (OBE) has not worked in South Africa. For someone of the stature of Mamphela Ramphele to say this openly and courageously is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stifling atmosphere of lip-service being paid to the ANC-government’s ill-starred, bureaucracy-blighted policy by many educators who admit privately that teachers are despondent and […]

South Africa continues to be one of the most polarised nations on earth with race still being one of the most contentious issues. Brandon Huntley’s story merely points this out once again. The ruling party and indeed many people in the country still use apartheid-era categorisations. Instead of fighting for a non-racial South Africa far […]

Nearly a quarter of a century ago I was at Rhodes University and included Afrikaans 1 among my subject choices. I will always remember the Afrikaans lecturers who insisted on referring to any Xhosa or Zulu-speaking female student as “that beautiful black woman with her impeccable Afrikaans” or that “wonderful black lady who got a […]

I have seen plenty of own goals before, some crazier than others, but Abou Diaby’s nonchalant header into the top corner almost takes the cake. Sadly, it was the death nail in an otherwise fantastic fight from Arsenal. I cannot imagine what went through his mind — if anything at all. Heck, he is not […]

A world-renowned scholar of public policy, Yehezkel Dror, recently reemphasised the point that policy and politics “closely interact, often overlap, and in part cannot be separated even analytically”. This seemingly obvious point, with far-reaching implications, has also been made by various eminent scholars. On poverty, Martin Ravallion — a leading scholar on issues of poverty […]

This blog is a recount of an almost typical day of dealing with the women in my life. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate … My Chinese god-daughter Sunshine meets me at the tacky old bus station I remember so well from my stay in Shaoxing […]

So deep seated was the unpopularity of the last war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that it was strongly in evidence even within the US and UK, the two main countries that waged it. Interesting, one finds parallels between this contemporary anti-war sentiment and what took place in South Africa a century previously when the British […]