Post-1994 South Africa is founded on the principle of progressive access to privilege. This principle implies that those in the suburbs will continue to live there while those in shacks will be progressively admitted into the ranks of those with houses and amenities. It also implies that those that earn decent salaries will continue to […]
white privilege
Posted inNews/Politics
Don’t trust people who say they’re not racist
There just aren’t any racists nowadays. I know, I was shocked too. It would seem to me that if you take to Facebook to call black people k*****s or monkeys, or believe that raping children is part of black culture, you are as racist as they come. But this accusation is categorically denied. White people […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The princess waitress and the dark forces
Myth and myth-making can be traced back to the origin of our species and is the archetypal language through which our spiritual and creative selves make sense of our world and fashion meaning. The mythic imaginary though, is not entirely free of religious or political bias. While certain archetypes are common to the collective human […]
Posted inGeneral
Yes, the beaches were packed but that was part of the joy
By Jerome September Going to the beach over the festive period was always something I looked forward to as a child. It was the highlight of a year that was often marked by great struggle. At the beach we could lose ourselves, we could play and stand in awe of the big dam with strong […]
Posted inEquality
I am white and privileged. Now what?
By Tamsyn Woolley I recently blogged about why white people struggle to “get” white privilege. But what if, as a white person, you do manage to “get” it? What then? As far away as I am from understanding all the nuances of what makes me privileged, this morning underpinned just how truly privileged I am. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
#ZumaMustFall: Whose hashtag is it anyway?
In the build-up to the #ZumaMustFall marches on December 16 (Reconciliation Day), a number of critical voices came to the fore. I wondered whether some #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall activists were perhaps not proprietary in their response to the new hashtag and the planned marches, which appeared to be driven largely by white, middle and upper-class […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The rainbow nation needs a paint job
By Franklyn Odhiambo Theorists say race is a representation of social differences in a code that defends interests and conflicts by referring to apparent physiological characteristics and the treatment of fixities from these references as social facts and thus empirical truths. They say too that racism and a race project occur when a group has […]
Posted inEquality, Lifestyle
What is ‘post’ in post-apartheid? Reflecting on my experiences
By Iris Nxumalo In a very engaging, robust class discussion about post-colonial societies, my lecturer challenged us by asking, “What is so post about post-colonial societies?” I paused. Upon reflection, I started to unpack our categorisations of people’s lived experiences into neat, temporal frameworks that organise our histories. I started to interrogate the places and […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, News/Politics
Decolonisation and the end of white male hegemony
Western civilisation has, since the dawn of patriarchy, privileged white masculine reasoning and meanings and depreciated the experience, knowledge and voices of women. With the advent of colonialism people indigenous to the Americas, Africa and other colonised lands, were also brutally constructed as less than human, “othered” and devalued by this monolithic white masculinist logic. […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
On whiteness and white guilt
There is a refrain that is often heard around the braai or the water cooler, and it goes like this: “Why should I have to apologise for apartheid? I wasn’t a part of it/was only a child/wasn’t yet born.” There is another one that I’ve been seeing more often lately, on Facebook and in thinkpieces, […]
Posted inEquality, Lifestyle, News/Politics
‘Don’t you want to be white?’
By Lorato Palesa Modongo “Coming to a new country always forces you to confront things about yourself that you never considered before.” — Staceyann Chin, poet. I am from Botswana. Literally next door. I came to South Africa in 2013 to take up postgraduate studies at Stellenbosch University. I had three reasons. Firstly, psychology is […]
Posted inEquality, General
It’s never too late to learn another South African language
Two months ago I decided to learn to speak isiXhosa. This is a big thing for a 53-year-old — some might say impossible. Others might say it is unnecessary. They might be right in strictly practical terms. I don’t need to speak isiXhosa. Very, very seldom do I have to communicate with someone who speaks […]