This last week, the fabulous young South African and increasingly world-renowned artist Faith47, posted an online petition to ask the City of Cape Town to please reconsider their decision NOT to restore the well-known and loved FREE MANDELA slogan on the wall of a cemetery in the suburb of Observatory. The slogan, that has been […]
Madiba
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Is the timing of Madiba’s passing an ANC political strategy?
I thought I’d said my last on the sad topic of Madiba’s illness. Tofolux would have certainly been pleased, as both my last two posts dealing with Madiba clearly upset him/her. But it was not Tofolux’s comment that got my attention. That honour belongs to BillyC, whose comment I initially disregarded as being impossible. It […]
Posted inEquality, Health, News/Politics
Has Mandela’s medical treatment created a bad precedent?
If Madiba is recovering in a manner consistent with the public announcements of being able to go home “soon” I will be the first to admit that my expectation that his days were severely numbered was wrong, and be very pleased that I was. Because it really did not sound good. Being “critical but stable” […]
Posted inNews/Politics
For the love of Mandela
By Derek Hook How should one approach the obsessive media speculation concerning Nelson Mandela’s declining health and approaching death? Such commentary as a rule wavers between requests that we respect Mandela’s privacy, honour the appropriate cultural customs and an unrelenting — and at times prurient — hunger for ever more details pertaining to Mandela and […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Mandela for blacks is different to Mandela for whites
As former president Nelson Mandela lies sick in hospital the narrative of what he will represent to future generations will, without a doubt, take a pendulum swing between two opposing sides. As we have all come to accept his inevitable departure, we find ourselves asking what we shall tell our kids about Mandela. Will whites […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Letting go of Madiba requires getting him in the first place
It’s become ubiquitous over the last three weeks, but the Zapiro cartoon of a sad South Africa sitting at the bedside of an ailing Nelson Mandela still touches. “I know it’s hard, but we have to start letting go”, it says in the speech bubble above his head. Madiba still lives, but his nearing end […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why I am not sad about Nelson Mandela
I am not sad about Nelson Mandela. I am surprised by this, because I expected to be, and for a long time I was. But now I am not, and I have been trying to work out why. Oh, I am sad about a lot of things. I am sad that he is old and […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Nelson Mandela: A giant leaves the world to pygmies
“That man is as healthy as a horse and as tough as they come. He’ll live to be a 100.” It was 1978 and prisoner 46664, Nelson Rolihlala Mandela, had just turned 60. The speaker was a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who, by virtue of international law, was twice […]
Posted inEquality
Will not waste it
Long time ago, when he was far too young to understand, I took my son to Robben Island. It was me who wanted to go. He didn’t care — he just wanted to go on the big boat ride and find seals and laugh and shout and say did you see that one with the […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Spare a thought for Madiba’s doctors and nurses
If I had to choose the way I could die, I would probably like to go peacefully in my sleep. It seems that Nelson Mandela no longer has that option. He may have had, and perhaps even been on that trajectory when he was rushed to hospital in the middle of the night more than […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
In captivity, in life and approaching death, we stalk Mandela
In a previous incarnation (what seems like a lifetime ago in a distant land) I worked as a journalist; as a reporter, a news photographer, a sub-editor and then as a political correspondent. The brief period that I worked as a news photographer coincided, loosely, with some of the darkest days of the late apartheid […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
On hatred and forgiveness
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, his unrelentingly bleak vision of humankind in thrall to a merciless totalitarianism, George Orwell relates how his mythical State of Oceania compels all its citizens to observe a daily “Two Minutes Hate” ritual. All citizens are required to watch a film denouncing the designated enemies of the all-powerful Party and work themselves […]