Three seemingly divergent articles found their ways on to my screen within the last 24 hours. I’m not sure if some supernatural puppeteer planned it that way or whether my innate penchant for irony simply sees connections where there aren’t really any. The first was Time‘s Friday 13 article by John Cloud, “Is Genius Born […]
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Posted inGeneral
Other people’s kids
People assume that just because one is a parent, one loves kids. Rubbish, I can’t stand kids that are not my own. And there’s nothing I hate more than parents who can’t stop jabbering on and on about their kids and how smart they are and how “little Sizwe said the sweetest thing the other […]
Posted inGeneral
Africans, you are your own worst enemy
Since the end of slavery and the period during the fight by Africans for independence from colonial rule, Africans had been imbued by a renewed sense of consciousness of their being and blackness. The struggle for liberation from the shackles of colonialism was primarily premised on the innate struggle for psychological emancipation from mental slavery, […]
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Carl Niehaus, blame-shifting and what we can learn from this
Blame-shifting is self-destructive energy. Carl Niehaus is obviously a desperate man. Desperate men do desperate things, therefore the gush of confessions coming out of his mouth needs to be closely checked. For instance, already Rhema Church has denied ever lending Carl Niehaus about R700 000; a spokesman claims the church only stood as surety on a […]
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Et tu Madiba?
by Marius Redelinghuys On my way to campus Monday morning I got a bit anxious when I read the Pretoria News posters alluding to some “Madiba magic” injection into the ANC’s election campaign, I pondered the possibilities of what this could really mean, but didn’t think much of it initially. However, as I walked into […]
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Referral system is just not cricket
This much-vaunted referral system the International Cricket Council (ICC) has implemented is a terrible decision. For one it has turned the hallowed grail of Test cricket into a stop-start contest, complete with all the hollow tension of a game show with a silly mystery prize. “Is he out or is he in? Let’s go upstairs […]
Posted inLifestyle
The noise in the night
The other night, a loud noise jolted me out of my slumbers. Immediately, I went into panic mode: adrenaline surging, heart thumping, muscles rigid, hearing attuned to the slightest clue as to what the cause might be. I waited. Another thump. The pipes? Then the faint sound of water running. It was the woman who […]
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Academic freedom alive and well
I have always been the foremost advocate of academic freedom among my peers, most of whom during their early undergraduate days did not see the relevance of academic freedom in their lives, which were seemingly interminable cycles of rote learning and repetition. Though they might have resented the absence of free thinking from their first-year […]
Posted inLifestyle
The peeping Sumo – a moral dilemma
So wrong, yet so right! I bet most of you have these moments, but not as much as I do these days. You know? You see something that is horrendously wrong, but it gives you so much pleasure even though you know your mother would’ve slapped you three times from Sunday had she been close […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The Orwellian rewriting of nursery rhymes
In George Orwell’s 1984, one of Winston Smith’s depressing jobs at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite historical documents to make them fit with party orthodoxy. He destroys evidence of problematic past events, amends newspaper articles and deletes from the historical record any people who have since been identified by the party as “unpersons”. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Cosatu: Anti-Semitic?
Readers who are of a mind to do so may scroll back and go through articles where I have tackled Islamophobia. This is an exercise I have done repeatedly not for any recognition but because I believe that intolerance is an evil which should not be allowed to go unchecked. It has also included an […]
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What are we thinking (if we are thinking) when we vote?
“You miss too much these days if you stop to think” — Bono of U2 I scowled as I watched Eric, a bright 16-year-old Chinese student. He liked to sit in the back of the class. He was blissfully ignorant of the fact that I could see him playing with his PlayStation behind his desk. […]