Thought Leader

So there I was, propping up a barn in Sweet Auburn, Atlanta. I was in town for a conference about racial justice (or the lack thereof) with my Consciousness Café colleague Keke. Two days before, Donald Trump had been elected president of the US, and the conference was a churned-up sea of angry, bewildered activists….

At this very moment, government efforts to enact the Traditional and Khoisan Leadership Bill are advancing; it is up to civil society to stop this. The legislation would entrench power and further legitimacy to undemocratic structures in traditional leadership operating within an often violent and corrupt rural political atmosphere. Even if the bill were conducive…

‘Race’* is an overused concept in South African discourses that frequently hides more than it reveals. Therefore, it remains imperative to scrutinise the particular historical context in which ‘race’ is wielded. When we discern how ‘race’ is applied to maintain or expand power, we can resist attempted reactivations of the apartheid template and disrupt ‘whiteness’…

Just what does a coloured have to do these days — short of knocking out the rest of his teeth or picking up the banjo — to get noticed in South African national debates? One really wishes the government would make up its mind. First they were saying there’s historically been an ‘over-concentration’ of bruin-ous…

It was interesting to note at a recent seminar on ‘Economic Freedom in Our Lifetime’ organised by the Xubera Institute for Research and Development, that out of all the panellists, only one mentioned the importance of education in attaining economic freedom. The panellists included an economist, an academic, a journalist/political analyst and a Provincial MEC….