1. Constantly compare your country, its people, its practices, its food, drink, scenery and products to the overseas version and always find the local version wanting. 2. Ignore the cynicism and spiritual poverty of nations who have seen better days. 3. Have no faith in home-grown solutions. Always look for international or European or US…
Next time you try to complain and in response some poorly-trained surly sod working for a diseased organisation in a sick building gives you a form to fill in that needs three years of audited financial statements, your life story in block letters, your race (the one none of us win), your gender (ditto) and…
My friend Johannes says that it is considered fortunate to have an Oak Tree at the entrance to your home. I do not know the name of the man who has lived in this tree for as long as I have driven along this leafy road, Observatory Curve in Johannesburg. Must be nearly 20 years…
In the past few weeks of politics in our country, it transpired that politics can be a dirty playground meant not for the fainthearted. Since the dramatic saga hit the news, and still receiving immense attention in popular media, some friends perhaps sensing that I am “mum” about the issue have asked what my reflections…
The media and certain political parties appear to be up in arms over the so-called failure of the Hawks, crime intelligence and the State Security Agency (SSA) to report on their alleged monitoring of an al-Qaeda training camp in South Africa. This is a no-brainer. Our top police units and SSA work with police and…
No doubt inspired by the recent success of the boycott movement in persuading Stephen Hawking not to attend the President Conference in June, Ahmed Kathrada, the veteran anti-apartheid activist who served time in prison on Robben Island, has written an open letter to Morgan Freeman condemning him for accepting the “key of knowledge award” by…
The DA has recently launched a poster campaign entitled “Know Your DA”. It attempts, I think, to bring to light the “untold” role that some of their founding members played in the fight against apartheid. Typical of South African politics, supporters of opposition parties countered these claims with a series of spoof posters, intent on revealing…
My daughter’s nanny died today, 10pm on the 12th day of December. The day of her passing is 11 days after December 1, World Aids Day, and 10 days after December 2, the day I was born. We celebrated her birthday two weeks after she had tested positive for HIV. Because *Nolwazi lived thousands of…
Here in Santiago, Chile, a number of South Africans have made thought-provoking contributions to the International Theoretical Psychology Conference at the Pontifical Catholic University. Almost without exception, the South Africans’ presentations were of the critical-psychological variety. Claire Haggard of UCT, for instance, explored the spatial situatedness of human bodies in phenomenological terms through the work…
By Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh May marks five years since the xenophobic attacks that shocked the nation. But what has happened since then? Are we better prepared to deal with criminality of that scale than we were five years ago? The simple answer is no. South Africa — in its 19 year democratic history — had never…
