The Humpty Dumpty of South African trade unionism has fallen off the wall. And all Emperor Zuma’s horses and all Emperor Zuma’s men never will put Humpty together again. Callooh, callay, oh frabjous day! On balance, the exit of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) from union federation Cosatu is a damn […]
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Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Of clowns, covert racism and whitewashing black concerns
The furore over the cartoon depicting the ANC parliamentarians and their electorate as a bunch of inept clowns is indicative of how far we still have to go in terms of embedded and unconscious racism in South Africa. There is nothing wrong with critiquing government in satirical depictions, but there is something horribly wrong when […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The DA’s Luthuli House march and our green-man-flashing democracy
Who in 1994 would have thought that in 2014 the ruling party would call upon an opposition party to abort its planned march on the ruling party’s headquarters, raising the spectre of violence if the march proceeded? But then, who would have thought that we would have an average of more than 30 protests a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The A to Z of things we cannot blame on apartheid
At Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, President Jacob Zuma made the point that “he (Mandela) told us that the promises of democracy would not be met overnight … and we all agreed with him … ”. Was this a co-option of Madiba somehow to justify the slow pace of service delivery? While it is true that […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mandela the Dalai Lama: A distorted narrative of black resistance
Black people — especially those among us who are still nursing wounds and raw apartheid pain — are being blackmailed into accepting a distorted narrative of black resistance. Nelson Mandela — the fervent leader of the mass resistance movement, the founder of the African National Congress’s youth brigade, the calculated strategist who was part of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
A state of emergency?
There was a time when journalists knew not to ask too many questions. A time when they knew not to dig too deep. There was a time when they had a healthy respect for authority and knew their place. The Mail & Guardian‘s leak of the Nkandla report marks that moment when the journalistic profession […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Seeing red: This is what hate speech looks like
What is the Red October movement hoping to achieve through its hate-based hodgepodge discourse that is a bizarre combination of radical left communist speak and backward racist doctrine, peppered with obtuse analysis and expedient misinterpretation of social statistics. No really — what do they see at the end of this tunnel vision? Do they think […]
Posted inMedia
Age of Truth…revolution betrayed?
Many hip-hop fans from the current generation may not know much about Prophets of da City (POC). Largely credited by academics for getting Cape Afrikaans hip-hop off the ground and paving the way for Spaza rappers, POC also put their heads on a block for their political principles … literally. The banned video “Understand Where […]
Posted inGeneral
#StopRape alone won’t stop rape
A significant component of the national outcry following the horrific gang rape and murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen highlighted the extent to which South Africans shift blame and culpability on the raped, and not the rapist. This manifests itself through the lazy recourse in our national dialogue to primitive and antiquated explanations for rape: broken […]
Posted inNews/Politics
They say critics of the ANC are racists, unpatriotic traitors
It’s ironic (but understandable, given his position as a senior government official in the department of arts and culture) that Sandile Memela’s article “They say government-sponsored artists are traitors” focuses primarily on the contribution of Wally Serote (former head of the ANC’s department of arts and culture and former chairperson of the parliamentary committee on […]
Posted inNews/Politics
On Zim’s wounded political beasts
Addressing the recent ZANU-PF annual congress, party leader and Zimbabwe president, Robert Mugabe likened the (mis)fortunes of his party to those of a wounded beast. “We are now like a wounded beast,” Mugabe said, adding emphatically, “You know how a wounded beast fights. Let’s fight back and restore our own pride.” Mugabe’s unhappiness with the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The politics of political hate speech
By David Smith Freedom of expression is an absolute. Unless, of course, the politics of South African president Jacob Zuma‘s re-election are in play. On Wednesday the governing African National Congress (ANC) promised to stop singing the anti-apartheid ditty Dubula iBhunu (Shoot the Boer) to avoid hurting the feelings of white farmers and inflaming racial […]