This morning, just after reading the news of Nelson Mandela’s death — uncannily coinciding with the world premiere of the film on his life — my partner and I were exploring the beautiful churches in Freiburg, Germany. In one of them (the Herz-Jesu) there is a series of magnificent paintings by Charles Bevaert, (I hope […]
democracy
Posted inNews/Politics
A state of emergency?
There was a time when journalists knew not to ask too many questions. A time when they knew not to dig too deep. There was a time when they had a healthy respect for authority and knew their place. The Mail & Guardian‘s leak of the Nkandla report marks that moment when the journalistic profession […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Face to face with democracy
Being South African forces one to reflect and re-evaluate, sometimes daily, how to identify, in some general and particular ways with who we are. Sum of parts, or a sore thumb, the nearly two decade’s span of freedom is a precarious space for identity. Too black, too white, not quite right, we continue to grapple […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Keith Hart on money, memory and democratising the economy
Keith Hart begins his thought-provoking book The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (Profile Books, London, 2000) with the statement: “Ours is an age of money. Half the world worships money and the other half thinks of it as the root of all evil. In either case, money makes the world go round. If […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Voting is no favour to any political party
By Gugu Ndima There is a growing concern at the rate in which the loosely categorised “born-frees” or “Mandela generation” is registering to vote. The current percentage of young people eligible to vote between the ages of 18 and 29 currently sits at 8.4%. As a nation this should be of grave concern given that […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The ‘new’ South Africa #BroughtToYouByTheANC
I was reading through status updates on Facebook when I saw one in particular that caught my attention. It was a photo of a DA billboard with lettering that reads: “E-tolls, proudly brought to you by the ANC”. I then decided that I’d provoke a discussion on my wall about what people thought of the […]
Posted inGeneral
Democracy is coming
FROM the moment Leonard Cohen entered my life back in 1970, his poetry and his music have profoundly influenced me. They have haunted my conscience, pestered my self-awareness and influenced my writing. You probably have similar influencers — painters who guided your expression, writers who moulded your experience, leaders who formed your social consciousness, preachers […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
To fix a broken working class
Some say that 20 years is not a long time to sink teeth into a fully-fledged new democracy. There have been many challenges to ignite economic growth while providing essential services to the South African nation. But the major gripe that seems to resonate in today’s times is that the powerful voice of the working […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Egypt: How not to do a political transition
You’ve been elected in your country’s first democratic election. Well done. That’s the easy bit done. Now you need to actually start governing. That, as Morsi found out in Egypt, is the difficult bit. Reasons abound for the overthrow of the Morsi government in Egypt. I want to focus on two issues: inclusive leadership and […]
Posted inGeneral
The ‘space of flows’ and the social elites of today
In Manuel Castells’s influential book, The Rise of the Network Society (Second edition, 2010, Chapter 6), he devotes a very revealing discussion to what he describes as the dominant spatial form of the network society, namely the “space of flows”. In his theorisation of the novel, now dominant spatial mode – the “space of flows” […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality
The age of the indebted, mediatised, securitised and depoliticised
In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest book Declaration (Argo Navis, 2012) — although, probably given its brevity (just over a hundred pages) compared to the books comprising their trilogy (Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth), they refer to it as a “pamphlet” — they articulate the global crisis of the present era in terms of four […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Any room for Afrikaners in the new South Africa?
About two months ago I wrote a light-hearted post (on my blog) about the South African language I considered to be the sexiest. The post was written for a limited audience and was not intended as social commentary. I rated Afrikaans fourth and said — in jest of course — that “unfortunately, Afrikaans is burdened […]