The shenanigans of alleged racism at City Press teach us clearly that the media is untransformed in this country. Instead the media professionals from the disadvantaged background now devote their time and energy to fighting over who is a black African and who is not? This battle for power, control and domination among the so-called […]
City Press
Posted inNews/Politics
Zuma’s ‘clever blacks’ lost in media translation
Considering the Babel of languages spoken in South Africa and how each developed verbal cues and connotations in state-sanctioned isolation, I think we’d all do well to ask, before assuming, if we’ve understood what the other is saying. This goes doubly so in instances when we think the other person has said something preposterously outrageous, […]
Posted inGeneral
On the interpretation of a painting
I did not really want to write this piece, knowing full well that it would be greeted by howls of derision and by vituperative incomprehension in many quarters. But as events unfolded in the wake of the public display, at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, of the Brett Murray painting metaphorically titled The Spear, reaching […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The Zuma portrait and black (male) sexuality
While delivering a keynote address at a conference focusing on Africa in the town of Swanwick in the UK Midlands on Saturday May 26 2012, I asked my audience what news coming out of my country or out of Africa they were aware of at this time. My audience was not aware of the exciting […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, News/Politics
Some sympathy for the editor, please
I too dislike the painting. It offends me for reasons I can’t quite fathom. I do know as satire it resembles the blow of a club more than the rapier thrust. Yet I am appalled by the Taliban-like reaction to it. Brett Murray must have an inkling of how Salman Rushdie felt. The spotlight, however, […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
The ANC’s bullying will fail to quash freedom
There has been much gnashing of teeth at the decision made by the editor of City Press, Ferial Haffajee, to remove a photo of Bretty Murray’s The Spear from the newspaper’s website. When it comes to the media, the ANC has brought all its indignant rage down on one publication – it has been useful […]