An installation and a documentary about the notorious residential school system amplify calls to define such deaths worldwide as genocide
genocide
Posted inEquality, General
Condemnation of UCT lecturer misses context
Groups slam UCT professor’s Hitler comment without an understanding of the lecture’s purpose
Posted inEquality, General
Namibia’s Blue Book of record: Part one
On 27 January, the world remembers the victims of the Holocaust, but it is also worth remembering the victims of Germany’s other, earlier genocide in Namibia. A rare book, commissioned by Britain in the early 1900s, stands as a record of the crimes against the Herero and the Nama
Posted inNews/Politics
How do we restore our common humanity, our human dignity?
I don’t know how to introduce myself anymore. I don’t know which hat to wear in public, or in identifying myself. Last week Friday, April 17, I wrote that “I’m not even sad or disappointed. I am pissed off and angry that there are South Africans who are attacking our brothers and sisters — fellow […]
Posted inEquality
Springtime in Auschwitz
I visit a death camp — at the wrong time of the year They show a curtain-raiser video on the tour bus from Krakow to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a 50-minute documentary based on the work of Alexi Vorontsov, the first Red Army soldier with a movie camera to enter these gates of hell in January 1945. Now […]
Posted inGender violence, News/Politics
Spreading hate in the name of God
For 10 minutes or so, the Wits Art Museum resembled a Pentecostal revivalist meeting. Hands were raised in worship as the crowd swayed and sang hymns. On stage, two pastors lay their hands on the person kneeling in front of them, the subject of their passionate prayers. This was not supposed to be. Not because […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
Keeping shtum*
When I was a young woman just out of school and during a state of emergency, while on a visit to my beautiful Boba, we were talking politics and I told her I was in despair and hoping for the Messiah. She said I could put out my cigarette for starters. Let me say this […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Is #whitegenocide funny if corrective rape isn’t?
Brace yourself. Some of you are not going to like this piece. Possibly quite a few of you. That’s the only predictable thing when it comes to jokes: somebody, somewhere is going to be offended. For years I’ve studied comedy from various angles: academically, from the trenches in the ad industry and as an occasional […]
Posted inGeneral
A sudden, suspect French antipathy to denialism
In 1915 Turkish authorities killed half a million Armenians in what most scholars — but unsurprisingly, not the Turks — agree was a genocide. Next week, the French senate is poised to pass a law that makes it a criminal offence to deny that this was genocide, to be punished with a maximum fine of […]
Posted inGeneral
Dear ANC, thanks for the liberation, we’ll take it from here
By Maphale Moloi In the wake of the recent ANC centenary celebrations, many have commented on the party’s role in post-apartheid South Africa. Some have said that the ANC is living in the past and is no longer relevant to the youth and/or the plight of the average South African. Let’s step back for a […]