It is happening. Last night in a church in Parktown North, three white Afrikaans men tried to explain how it feels to be white to an audience of almost-exclusively black South Africans. The previous night, in a church in Pretoria, three black men opened up to what it was like to be black, and what […]
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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, Lifestyle, Media
Am I a writer?
I’m an ink-stained notebook fiend, most of my pens get chewed like a rabid terrier, I write poems, post copious amounts of blog posts, churn out news reports, provide opinion pieces for several publications, proofread anything that crosses in front of my eyes, heck I even accuse non-readers of treachery against humans (spoiler: writers hate […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The world won’t slow down for Africa to catch up
By Dr Noah Manyika Let me start with a confession: I have not always been my wellbeing’s best friend. I have bristled when others have described my lapses in judgment as … lapses in judgment. I have not always been man enough to consider as friends those who point out my shortcomings, and at times […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
Do men deserve any praise?
As I hopped onto the taxi this morning, I spotted a man peeing on the side of the road. At that moment, as someone who is anti peeing on the side of anything, toilet seat included, I just swelled up with rage. I was also listening to a breakfast radio show as they spoke about […]
Posted inEquality, General
Cultural embodiments of the life and death instincts in human beings
Since the 19th century, when the heirs of 17th- and 18th-century British empiricism started thinking of the social implications of the empiricist doctrine, that all we know comes from experience, thinkers like Lord Shaftesbury and his ilk have believed that human society was “perfectible”. After all, if society could be arranged in such a way […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality
The death of international development
International development is dying; people just don’t buy it anymore. The West has been engaged in the project for more than six decades now, but the number of poor people in the world is growing, not shrinking, and inequality between rich and poor continues to widen instead of narrow. People know this, and they are […]
Posted inGeneral
Ethics always comes too late for power
If there is one lesson I have learned from Foucault, it is this: Ethics always comes too late for power. What I mean by this is that human beings – even philosophers – have a tendency to rationalise, in ethical or moral terms, about the actual decisions and choices one makes in the world, and […]
Posted inEquality
The untold history lesson…
I have spent a good two hours writing this exam paper and am relieved to be finally constructing a good response, with just over an hour to go before “pens down”. No later than my relief came, the intercom rings, and with that my answer vanishes. “The school is requested to please stop writing, stand […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Crime: There is something rotten in the state of South Africa
Driving to work this morning I heard the news about the fatal shooting of Bafana Bafana and Orlando Pirates captain Senzo Meyiwa. Saddening and extremely disturbing as it is, the irony of the matter is that it is even more saddening that the vast majority of people who fall senseless victims to the apparently never-ending […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Depression never leaves you
By Sifiso Yengwa With Robin Williams’ death still fresh in the minds of many, the issue of depression has once again come to the fore. Nowadays it is generally accepted that depression is a clinical condition that is manageable with drugs and other forms of prescribed treatment. Sadly the majority of people still hold a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Pallo Jordan is no fraud
Clarity of thought and articulate intellectual leadership is neither a product of holding a PhD nor the result of spending years to acquire one-dimensional professionalised knowledge to be an expert or a guru. Rather, it comes from a deep-seated passion and love for what America’s leading thinker Cornel West defined as the “life of the […]