While watching Gillian Schutte’s documentary “It’s my hair … I bought it”, I thought the hair debate must come to an end. It’s banal and redundant. Talking about black women’s hair needs to stop being a question of national importance. Our hair is not all of who we are. Why have I never seen a […]
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Posted inEquality, News/Politics
On hatred and forgiveness
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, his unrelentingly bleak vision of humankind in thrall to a merciless totalitarianism, George Orwell relates how his mythical State of Oceania compels all its citizens to observe a daily “Two Minutes Hate” ritual. All citizens are required to watch a film denouncing the designated enemies of the all-powerful Party and work themselves […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Sarah Palin has her once-in-a-million-year Hamlet moment
One always knew, as with the averred statistical likelihood of a million chimpanzees with a million keyboards in a million years eventually producing the equivalent of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that it had to happen. Now after a lifetime of effort, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has at last said something intelligent. Palin, who has […]
Posted inEnvironment
Johannesburg: The city that once was
About a year ago at a party, I met a well-known South African artist (he shall remain nameless) who described the Johannesburg Art Gallery as “Miss Havisham in her wedding dress”. He wasn’t saying it spitefully, he seemed to really like JAG; it was just a very honest, pithy comment. I believe the metaphor can […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Malema the new King Shaka?
With elections lurking, developments in the political scene have created a political conundrum for the poor and disenfranchised: do they vote on loyalty or for change? The recent announcement of new political entrants, particularly Mamphela Ramphele’s Agang and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters, has meant the poor have new choices to make. With due recognition […]
Posted inEquality, General
Are non-Afrikans inherently bad?
On June 8 2013 fellow Thought Leader blogger Malaika wa Azania shared a short opinion piece on her FB wall. In it she raised debate around the apparent Ubuntu in African people, and how the white man has “made of us animals with their capitalism and individualistic ideologies”. She argued that Africans have been taken […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Cape Town and the Obamas
The hullabaloo around the award of the Freedom of the City to the Obamas (now accepted) reminds me of that remarkable day in September 2006 when then senator Barack Obama addressed a packed meeting at the Centre for the Book, organised and hosted by the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) and the US […]
Posted inLifestyle
South Africa’s ripe for Living Newspaper
Life imitating art taught me form does not always have to trump function. Running the Leader of the Opposition’s office in Parliament until shortly before the 2009 elections, an invitation from a Jewish community forum in Seapoint known as The Living Newspaper was one of the last engagements for which I had to see preparations […]
Posted inEquality, Media
White writers writing black characters – a form of literary blackface?
White South African writers who create black characters are often challenged about the authenticity of their writing. If their main protagonist is black, this challenge intensifies, and if they write in the first person, it intensifies further. There is something particularly intimate about first-person narrative. It gets under the skin of the character in a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Denying it’s xenophobia isn’t helping
By David Cote The recent attacks against foreign nationals, particularly those operating shops in townships and informal settlements, have sent shivers down the spines of many in South Africa and across the continent. It has been five years since coordinated attacks exploded across the country and led to the deaths of 64 people and the […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Lack of basic services compromises women’s dignity
A trip into any of the hundreds of informal settlements in South Africa is a brutal reminder of the need to highlight issues such as the absence of basic services for women living in impoverished conditions. Women struggle against the diseases that flourish in areas that offer virtually no services. This clip is from the […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
‘Unwanted, dirty’: The ‘fictitious’ gang rape (II)
(Continued from previous blog) Bend, Not Break largely shifts between Ping’s nightmarish childhood and her adult life in the US. In America she grows, step by painful step, into a successful businesswoman in the software industry. Before this, sometime after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government demanded she leave China. This is because of the […]