Thought Leader

By Refiloe Makama “Men are never ugly”. Nnu Ego makes this statement in Buchi Emecheta’s novel, The Joys of Motherhood, set during the colonial period in Nigeria. In a scene between two friends, the protagonist Nnu Ego had recently lost her first child, and Ato, her childhood friend comes to comfort her. In a memorable moment,…

By Refiloe Makama On the 19th of May 2018 the world watched the wedding ceremony of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. With over 29 million people watching, the wedding was filled with every detail that marks a ‘true fairy-tale‘. Right here at home, every Sunday on the popular channel Mzanzi…

By Mpho Buntse The rainbow nation, as South Africa is affectionately known, was abuzz with praise from international Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) pressure groups, the shallow voices of the same sex marriage critics mattered less, and media organisations, even those that are known to be ridiculously conservative towards LGBTI affairs, flaunted on…

I am proud to have met and known a youth who has consciously chosen to become a man, a son who, in his own right, has become a father and a head of a family. I feel that becoming a man, a father, a husband and a head of the family at the age of…

Recently a young man lost his penis. The member in question was lost during an initiation ritual and when he attempted to ask the elders what to do about it (raising the matter in a public forum) he allegedly received a beating. The reason he got this beating? Because by speaking out the initiate was…

South Africans have woken up each morning for the past month to the intimate politics of love (and loss) on their television screens and newspapers pages. The death of Reeva Steenkamp and the ongoing trial has placed questions of love and how we love at the centre of the social consciousness. Although unrelated from the…

KwaZulu-Natal broke new ground recently. Two men, draped in traditional apparel, stood before family, friends and well-wishers. There was music, there was love and I imagine the good-old wedding jitters. They said “I do” and shared a kiss. The newlyweds are Tshepo Cameron Sithole-Modisane and Thoba Calvin Sithole-Modisane. The Sithole-Modisanes are not your “ordinary” young,…

By Anneke Meerkotter The first thing you are confronted with when you walk into the service section of the South African embassy in Harare is a South African department of home affairs poster on the process to register civil unions, including same-sex marriages. Why is this interesting? Because Zimbabwe’s first draft constitution released last week…

Something truly extraordinary is happening in the US labour market. At the beginning of 2010, it was revealed, that for the first time in the country’s history, women held a majority of the nation’s jobs. The dramatic rise of women within the ranks of the gainfully employed shouldn’t be seen as solely an American phenomenon….

Getting married is a lot like buying a pair of shoes. Think about it. You go into the shoe store, you look around. Maybe you’re there because you actually need shoes, maybe you found yourself in there because there’s a sale on and those sandals looked gorgeous and and and … you just can’t help…