Women are not a homogenous group and the notion of gender equality cannot be reduced to power struggles between women and men, Catherine Albertyn, Constitution,
Colonisation
Posted inGeneral
African feminism and its project of decolonisation
African feminism is engaged in the project to recoup indigenous knowledge systems and to salvage identities that were destabilised by foreign incursions
Posted inGeneral
It is your choice whether to embrace endings or beginnings
Our current era of crisis can also give us a promise of new growth
Posted inEquality, General, Media, News/Politics
Kingsolver’s narrative indictment of colonisation: The Poisonwood Bible
I have written about Barbara Kingsolver’s (and other figures’, such as Salman Rushdie’s) novelistic art here before and even referred to The Poisonwood Bible cursorily — but recently the effect of colonisation on the inhabitants of certain continents (in this case Africa) has occupied my attention afresh. Hence this post, specifically on Kingsolver’s masterpiece, The […]
Posted inBusiness, General, News/Politics
The REAL task of decolonisation
Too few people seem to take the work of those two inimitably emancipatory thinkers, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, seriously. And I am not talking about those nit-picking academics who engage with them at an analytic level to argue about whether they got Marx right, or Foucault, or Deleuze, and so on. What I mean […]
Posted inEquality, General, Media
What ‘decolonisation’ means: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India
With all the talk about “decolonising” university curricula (see http://thoughtleader.co.za/bertolivier/2016/03/23/decolonisation-the-new-ideology/), which has again cropped up among the demands of the protesting students, I thought it might be productive to remind students and academic staff alike of one of the most eloquent – in fact, together with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, exemplary – critical literary […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
‘Decolonisation’, the new ideology
Everywhere one looks today in South Africa you find a new imperative: “Decolonise!” In certain academic quarters it has evidently already attained the level of a new ideology, where academics are expected to “decolonise” the courses they teach (and presumably the articles they submit for publication as well). What astonishes me is that academics do […]
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, General
South Africa reboot?
In the course of all the hype around “Rhodes must fall”, I started wondering about the logic underpinning the direction in which it has been developing, which seems to indicate that — as some commentators have indicated — nothing less than South Africa “falling” would satisfy those driving the process of destroying all vestiges of […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Memory and moving forward: #RhodesMustFall is not a shitty argument
If you do not like something, throw poop at it. This was the thinking of some protestors who called for the removal of the Rhodes statue from the University of Cape Town campus citing that the continued presence of the statue was an ode to the white dominance of the past. The calls for the […]
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Fanon and the question of ‘white theory’
It is undeniable that Frantz Fanon identifies European, or “white” culture as racist to the core. It is equally undeniable that he affirmed the likelihood of the discourses of knowledge emanating from this culture being equally racist. It stands to reason that a culture, which regards itself as being superior to all others, given its […]