The Constitutional Court recently handed down judgment regarding the nature and scope of the powers of provincial legislatures. The judgment, Premier: Limpopo Province vs Speaker of the Limpopo Provincial Legislature and others, (2011) (Limpopo 1) was a consequence of the Constitutional Court’s finding in Premier: Limpopo Province vs Speaker: Limpopo Provincial Legislature and others, (2012) […]
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Posted inTech
One hell of a Journey
You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little out of it. I’ve just had my brain scrambled. I’ve just finished a videogame called Journey, which is a downloadable game on the PlayStation network. Journey is as simple as Tetris. Simpler, in fact, because while Tetris was a basic concept, it required far more mental […]
Posted inGeneral
A sausage machine called education
The red ball bounces across the classroom while about fifty pairs of kiddies’ eyes stare enthralled, counting the number of bounces, seven, eight, nine… The ball starts to roll and team three in the class roars out, “ELEVEN!” They had guessed eleven bounces and therefore their team gets points. I am teaching them numbers, and […]
Posted inGeneral
Beyond protecting the environment: Ensuring life support
Several recent reports on a variety of things have made me return to an important book by Thomas Princen, Treading Softly – on which I have written here before. The news items that caught my eye covered different, but related topics. Two of them focused on court cases involving big oil companies – Chevron and […]
Posted inGeneral
Debating universities’ admissions policies
By Khethelo Xulu Reading what other young people in the country think about the future and the direction the country is taking is thought-provoking. As a young citizen of the country, I usually follow and participate in such debates. The most recent debate I have engaged in centers on universities’ admissions policies. An article about […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
South Africa, the Rome Statute, Zimbabwe and torture
By Clare Ballard “Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.” – Wendell Phillips So accustomed have we become to reports of atrocities in war-ravaged, post colonial Africa that I believe we’d be forgiven for associating the term ‘impunity’ with the perpetrators of these crimes, even though the nature of […]
Posted inGeneral
Homosexuality is African
Anyone who says that homosexuality is un-African is racist. We have an enormous body of historical and scientific evidence for the existence of homosexuality in every culture on every continent and stretching back in time as far as the human record goes. Homosexuality may not be normal, but it is natural. The South African government […]
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Dragged into a pit by Eskom
by Roger Diamond With Eskom being a spade, the mining industry a shovel, and the government digging surprising harder than it does most tasks, the pit we call our home is getting deeper by the year. Well actually, we’re all to blame for being consumers, but somehow there is something wrong when organisations that have […]
Posted inGeneral
Africa is not a movie script
By Takura Zhangazha American and Hollywood celebrities are great to watch in the popular movies and television series that are now available on many African TV channels. In recent years, like celebrity sportspersons, they have also become involved with international humanitarian organisations (such as Unicef) to increase global awareness of the many disasters that afflict […]
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Death of a school friend
The first time I encountered Robert Jackson, as a seven-year-old in the Sandown Primary School playground, I hit him in the teeth and made him howl. This was ironic in that during our respective school careers I was a first-class wuss whereas Rob had a reputation as something of a fighter. The second irony was […]
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Vernon Philander: the next great South African orator
As South Africans we are far too quick to credit people from overseas with brilliance in a particular field while condemning any local who dares to stand on the brink of greatness. How often, for example, do you hear academics and the media going on and on about wonderful speakers like Winston Churchill, Martin Luther […]
Posted inGeneral
Discovering ubuntu in the Somali regions of Africa
By Namhla Thando Matshanda On a recent trip to the Horn of Africa I spent a substantial amount of time in Somali-inhabited areas. Most of this time was spent in Ethiopia’s Somali regional state, with a brief visit to the autonomous northern region of Somalia, Somaliland. I feel compelled to write this piece in the […]