For every occasion, there is an instance so poignant only the willfully blind and the intentionally deaf can miss it. Such moments tend to happen outside and in spite of the rehearsed and the orchestrated. They can be dramatic or surreal. In the FIFA World Cup of 2006, such a definitive moment occurred in the […]
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Posted inGeneral
Regulation of the porn industry is not a free speech issue
Late last year, South Africa’s journalists and assorted media types decked themselves out in black to protest the Protection of State Information Bill. Shortly thereafter the news sites started buzzing with proposals to introduce a porn channel to our TV sets. And very shortly after that, various organisations threatened to boycott the channels concerned and […]
Posted inLifestyle
Would Joburg be Joburg without the Hillbrow Tower?
“The skyline is burning” goes the song I’m playing in my car. The track is titled The Horizon is the Beltway and it’s appropriate (in that way that random things often are) because I’m driving around looking for vantage points from which to photograph the Sandton skyline. Now that I’m introducing Sandton into my work […]
Posted inNews/Politics
An open letter to Angie Motshekga
Dear Madam I know that you are a busy person and this period in particular is the most hectic with centenary celebrations in full swing. I would like to congratulate you and your department, together with nine MECs and the respective departments in various provinces. Let me rather skip the pleasantries and get to the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
ANC conservative nationalism and ambidextrous politicians – Open Letter to Phillip Dexter
Dear Dr Dexter, The formal style of address may seem cold and harsh but I cannot bring myself to refer to you as comrade or Phillip, as I have always done. The man who sat so smugly next to Marius Fransman yesterday, singing the praises of the ANC was not the one I fought alongside […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, News/Politics
There’s something odious about academic publishing
There is something terribly wrong about peer-reviewed scholarship and about academic publishing in general. It resembles an exclusive club of knowledge production where new knowledge is circulated among an elite group of scholars who confirm each other’s prejudices and biases and then pat each other on the back. In some ways, once new knowledge is […]
Posted inGeneral
Yay，Secret Santas! We just gotta give
I will never forget it. I was one of those young men back in the early eighties who had a choice: two years’ military conscription or four years in jail. I disliked either option but chose the shorter “jail” sentence and thankfully ended up as a telex operator. One of the little businesses going on […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
The fallibility of memory
I am in the final stages of research and writing a paper on memory which I expect to submit for peer review and publication early in the new year. This paper has proven most difficult to complete, least of all because I started doing research about eight months ago — at the beginning of a […]
Posted inNews/Politics, Sport
Race: Some thoughts about a discussion not had…
What’s in a word? Quite a lot, sometimes, and not a helluva lot other times. But who’s to say? Several years ago, one of my dearest of friends, AGRB, was accused of being a spy for the apartheid state. I knew that the accusation was baseless, so did most of our colleagues in the media. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Linden execution: High horses and hometown tangos
This week a 35-year-old South African drug trafficker, Janice Linden, was executed in China by lethal injection. That China should dare apply its own laws on its own territory has unleashed in South Africa a whirlwind of misplaced outrage and platitudinous sanctimony. The Inkatha Freedom Party termed the execution ‘unfortunate’ — which it undoubtedly was […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
How to occupy the world
The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for world revolution.” This is an ambitious claim. In most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centres around the world. On October […]
Posted inGeneral
‘Racism without races’
In the late eighties French thinker Etienne Balibar wrote an essay in which he considered the question of “neo-racism”, that is, a form of racism that is distinct from earlier models. Balibar’s point of departure is a description of racism as inscribing itself in “practices (forms of violence, contempt, intolerance, humiliation and exploitation), in discourses […]