By Lehlohonolo Mofokeng When I was in high school I seldom thought about the significance of my grade 11 results for life after school. Many students think grade 12 is the most important but nothing could be further from the truth. These days you stand little chance of landing a good job or starting a […]
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Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Media-ting the debate: What is the role of responsible media?
By Dylan Stewart The media plays a powerful role in driving public opinion, however media companies depend on the public’s readership for the income that will keep it in business. A responsible media needs to masterfully strike a fine balance to maintain its integrity and its consumer base. This is an article responding to the […]
Posted inBusiness
Where should the rand be?
For those who see conspiracy in the steep plunge in the value of the rand against the US dollar, the graph below showing the decline of the Australian dollar can only mean a similar conspiracy against the Australian currency. If you don’t believe in conspiracies — which is not the same as acknowledging that traders […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
My name is Tim, I’m a racist and I’m running for president
A non-practising one. Probably best to make that clear right up front. “You cannot teach a racist to change,” says Rusty Bedsprings on an online forum, “you can only show him that his bigotry holds no power”. Wrong. You can and it does, big time. This is the whole point: Racism has South Africa by […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
The poor economy is not all Zuma’s fault
Some lessons I have learned from reporting on economic crises: * Don’t fixate on any one cause. Economies are complex webs of interrelated phenomena. Interest-rate changes are not the whim of the central bank, ie the Reserve Bank. They depend on a range of other economic actors, including our government and other economies in the […]
Posted inEquality, General
Language, belonging and the decolonial moment at South African universities
In recent months the spotlight has, yet again, been shone on universities in South Africa. This time, the focus was on the fact that leading institutions (all of whom were previously designated as for “whites only”) remains largely untransformed. This time around, though, the focus was not only on numbers (even though that remains an […]
Posted inEquality
#IlookLikeASurgeon: A hashtag campaign that leaves me cold
#ILookLikeASurgeon first appeared on my timeline a week or so ago. I was interested in it because I’m a surgeon in training. Background: it’s a campaign against gender stereotypes. Piggy-backing on a campaign called #ILookLikeAnEngineer, it aims to show that surgeons are no longer just good-looking white dudes (think: Chris Barnard in the sixties) flanked […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
SA journalism: No agenda required
Newspaper editors aren’t much given to introspection. Whatever their political hue, they tend to have a virtually unshakeable belief that their particular interpretation of reality is the correct one. It of course makes for spectacular miscalculations, such as when Peter Bruce, then Financial Mail editor, in 1999 urged voters to support the fledgling United Democratic […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, Media, News/Politics
Anger, ‘outrage’ and the internet
Quite often, when I log on to Twitter, I’ll see comments like the following: “What are we angry about today? Did I miss today’s Twitter outrage? I don’t know what we’re supposed to be angry about this week, but I’m outraged just in case.” It happens especially after incidents like Bic’s sexist Women’s Day ad […]
Posted inMedia
Bic, and why creativity matters
When the Bic Women’s Day outrage first hit the social media fan, I was driving back from the Tembe Elephant Park where my husband and I had spent our first anniversary. I am in Durban this week for the Loeries, so creativity is top of mind – which is relevant, because creativity is central to […]
Posted inGeneral, Media
Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and American gun culture
A recent article on Yahoo addresses an interview with Miley Cyrus in which she expressed the view that she is often labelled a bad role model while, by contrast, the pop star with the squeaky clean image, Taylor Swift, is seen as the good role model. This divergence, she argued, hides double standards, more particularly […]
Posted inGeneral
‘Kist’ – did you know it’s a uniquely South African word?
Recently I finished writing a novel titled Orphan Country, which is partly set in South Africa in the Seventies and Eighties. One of my main characters, Ruth, is half-Chinese and was adopted at birth. She has little clue as to who her parents really are and part of the storyline is her finding out more […]