Three months before he was voted in as president, Zuma took out his machine gun and slipped a ball through Irvin Khoza's legs. In most countries, this would be called "infidelity", in South Africa it's called shibobo.
No wonder we're such poor foo...
An interesting email did the rounds last week. It was an open letter/apology from a former South African Breweries (SAB) employee to Proteas batting star Hashim Amla, which was posted by Bobby Skinstad on his personal blog. The story goes that when A...
I meet Huwaida Arraf at the Palestinian Struggle and Human Spirit Film Festival held in the working class district of Athlone in Cape Town. It's a chilly evening but I request we move our conversation outside. The fake Israeli soldiers harassing patr...
I have had it with Indian businesses. Sure, half of them are my cousins and all that, but even shared bloodlines and Sunday Akhni doesn't make shitty service and bigoted operations okay. We all talk about how big ol' Telkom, SABC, Eskom and SAA rip u...
After telling me where he was from, he grunts and looks the other way, nostrils flared as he pretends to admire the scenery. Of course, through the crowded wig-wagging of bodies, there was nothing to see. I peer at him and he reminds me of something ...
It is a glorious summer morning in Istanbul; colours of the sky resemble a messy oil painting; both resplendent and melancholic in one go. After roaming around the ancient Roman road in Sultanahmet, Divanyalo Caddessi, searching for a cheap but tasty...
If you haven't blogged, made a poster, built a sand castle or ran naked through the streets screaming "the climate changers are coming", then you're quite a tough cookie aren't you? If you haven't switched off the lights and sat in the dark or consid...
I am not a fan of famous professors. They are normally so caught up in their research that they're often socially starved animals; aloof and arrogant in their approach. I'd rather read their work than meet them. Some have been in the library so long ...
The Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo is a sort of religious site. Sitting adjacent to the harbour in central Oslo, a spot that could easily pass for Cape Town's waterfront, the Peace Centre is a temple for serious diplomats, earnest hippies and wide-eyed, ...
I
I jump off a packed train in Munich and walk from the platform towards the station when a plain clothes policeman stops me. He flashes his badge at me. He is not an immigration officer. He is an undercover cop. I give him my passport, simultaneous...
Azad Essa is a freelance journalist, lecturer and an aspiring filmmaker. He completed an MA with the Global Studies Program in 2005, spending semesters in Germany and India, during which he encountered a number of head-banging social theories explaining why the world was, is and always will be unfair. Of course, he knew them already, but the travelling really rocked.
By day, he butters his bread at IOLS at UKZN, the Workers College and whoever else willing to give him work. But by night, he swiftly sheds his mask, dons a cape and sets out to flay flag bearers of social inequality, political injustice and dim-wittedness. Azad is some sort of accidental academic, forced into intellectual slavery after making a poor case on the sports field. All he really wants is to be free.
Accidental Academic won best political blog at the South African Blog awards 2009
