I was somewhere outside Frankfort on my way to the Clarens Craft Beer Festival when I heard the ruling. I can’t be sure exactly, but I know I was on the R26 and there were potholes, and SAFM was the only station I could pick up. 702 had kept me company from Johannesburg, onto the […]
Oscar Pistorius
Posted inNews/Politics
Is Oscar’s attorney really a star?
Why is the defence advocate, Barry Roux, considered a star by the faceless social media when a defenceless woman was killed? One realises there are sub-editors, and part of their jobs is just to make a sensational headline. But the story in reports like these celebrate Roux as if he were a chess grandmaster. The […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Innocent ’til proven guilty…
I, like many, have been following the Oscar Pistorius saga on Twitter. The plethora of tweets on one topic is something that I have not seen before. Almost everyone seems to have an opinion, a view on what happened and how it went down, and some, maybe even most, have a verdict. Yesterday Pistorius was […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Let’s face it, we’re a nation of hypocrites
When we wear the right colour T-shirt and then forget to wear our activist hat when the girl on the street gets harassed. When we’ve been following the news with bated breath because we care about violence against women, but we really want to see if pretty boy goes to lock-up or goes home, or […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why are we obsessed with the Oscar case?
A week is a very long time these days. In our addiction to new news, we’ve become a society with ADD, The half-life of any given story is a day, if that. Since the story that Oscar Pistorius shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, we have spoken and tweeted […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Oscar, Reeva and the hypocrisy of popular activism
Violence against women is a moral-turned-physical plague, and it has bedridden South Africa. Our mothers, daughters, sisters, children and friends are sitting ducks. They are targets of the male ego. Violence against women is the patriarch’s last stand. He is gripping on to his illegitimate, undeserved “entitlements”. The howling storm of change brings with it […]
Posted inGeneral
Botha first casualty of the Pistorius media circus
Is it any wonder that members of the National Prosecuting Authority and the police are wary of the efforts of the media when it comes to high-profile criminal matters? I have worked against our prosecutors and police for a number of years and have found them to be highly dedicated professionals tasked with protecting an […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Oscar Pistorius and the State of the Nation
In a recent conversation with a cartoonist friend, he suggested that his daily work had changed from providing insights into our lived reality through over-the-top images, to toning down our over-the-top reality for a baffled and battered citizenry, through light relief. Artists, cartoonists and writers often use metaphors to provide insights into the state of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Reeva, Oscar and the media lens
It was on my daily two-hour commute to work, tweeting my regular #TaxiTales, that I came to learn of Reeva Steenkamp’s killing on Thursday morning. Still shell-shocked from the gruesome rape and murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen just the week before, and only just starting to unpack the prevailing culture of rape and other forms […]
Posted inGender violence, News/Politics
A correct police response to domestic violence could save lives
Every eight hours in South Africa, a woman is murdered by her intimate partner. Three a day. At least. The Preamble of the Domestic Violence Act (DVA) states that victims of domestic violence are among the most vulnerable members of society. The DVA describes a variety of behaviours that can be classified as domestic violence […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Oscar and Chekhov’s Gun
There is a rule in screenwriting that if you introduce a gun into a scene, at some point you must use it. The rule applies to real life too. That’s how Reeva Steenkamp lost her life. A gun appeared in her story, and she got shot dead. Regardless of the circumstances, when guns are near […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why I am glad Reeva is on TV
I am not in the target market for the Tropika Island of Treasure, the reality show in which one of the celebrity guests is Reeva Steenkamp. Though I have an inexplicable weakness for pineapple flavoured dairy fruit juice blend, I am not one of the people who will have fitted into the marketing brief, which […]