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 […]
Nelson Mandela
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The trouble with liberals
The word liberal traces its history back to the Latin liber, which means “free”. Author and founding member of the Liberal Party in South Africa, Alan Paton, described this body of thought as such: “By liberalism I don’t mean the creed of any party or any century. I mean a generosity of spirit, a tolerance […]
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
Mandela – what lies beneath?
By Sipho Singiswa It may be hard for many to gracefully accept or admit, as has been an African tradition, that when Madiba has decided he is ready to go meet his ancestors or when they call him, only he will know when best to go. I am writing in response to all the liberal […]
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 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 […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Malema the new King Shaka?
With elections lurking, developments in the political scene have created a political conundrum for the poor and disenfranchised: do they vote on loyalty or for change? The recent announcement of new political entrants, particularly Mamphela Ramphele’s Agang and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters, has meant the poor have new choices to make. With due recognition […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mandela’s youthful creation also in extremis
While Nelson Mandela clings precariously to life in a Pretoria hospital, the organisation he helped birth finds itself similarly in extremis. Mandela, however, would find it difficult to recognise in today’s African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) anything that would make him and his co-founders proud. For not only is the offspring an embarrassment to […]