A year or so ago a "gentleman's club" -- or, more specifically, a club where women take off their clothes for men in return for money -- plastered large promotional posters all over bus stops in Cape Town.
The exhibited draw card was a stereotypi...
A while back I had the disconcerting experience of receiving a spontaneous ovation from an audience consisting mainly of Afrikaners. The statement that led to the unexpected explosion in enthusiasm was that ANC members seem not to be promoted despite...
Jolly. Jovial. Man of the people. This is how presidential hopeful Jacob Zuma has been projecting himself to South Africans. Here and there reality interfered – rape trial, corruption charges – but Zuma kept up the singing and dancing.
When a...
Recently Dr Mamphela Ramphele astutely observed that the problem with African leaders is their inability “to envision their roles as agents of fundamental transformation of their societies”. I want to extend her point to those in the business of ...
With his latest Sunday Times cartoon, Zapiro has ventured where angels should fear to tread. I am saying "should" because it shows that journalist-cartoonists can be as desensitised as other South Africans about the social crises that beset us.
I...
Déjà vu -- again. And of a particularly nasty variety too. After refusing to apologise for inciting violence by saying he’d “kill” for ANC president Jacob Zuma, ANCYL president Julius Malema promised not to use the word “kill” in public a...
This is us. No miracle nation. No rainbow nation. Just us: violent; intolerant of difference -- hitting where it hurts. Let’s not try to sweet-talk ourselves. This is who we are. Let’s look ourselves in the eye.
We are lurching from crisis to ...
Reading the responses to my last blog, one can only wonder if honest introspection is at all possible in this society, rent as it is by greed and bigotry.
An anonymous little letter landed on my desk the other day. It was a photocopy of a book exc...
I recently wrote an essay where I explored the question in the heading, one that is equally applicable to English-speaking white people in South Africa.
The racist incident at the University of the Free State makes this question relevant yet again...
What is happening to the ANC? Raw power politics has replaced principle. Where are the women and men of heart and reason to raise their voices within the party now? Too few; too overrun by a new brand of leadership that has tasted state power and wan...
Christi van der Westhuizen is an award-winning political journalist and the author of White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007). She has worked at Vrye Weekblad, Beeld and ThisDay and has regular columns in The Star, Cape Times, The Mercury and Pretoria News and in Media 24's dailies. She has been interviewed for political comment on the BBC, Radio New Zealand, Radio Adelaide (Australia), SAfm, SABC3, e-tv and M-Net.
In 2005, she edited Gender Instruments in Africa: Critical Perspectives, Future Strategies while working as senior researcher in International Relations. Currently she is Inter Press Service's trade project editor for Africa and Europe. She holds an MPhil in political economy and South African politics.
