Christopher Hitchens, author, journalist, master debater and razor-sharp intellectual has died. His passing was accompanied by an almost audible sigh of collective relief from the many hapless individuals that encountered him in debate while he lived. You could search long and hard for a sharper tongue driven by a more insightful, enormous brain for all…
Christmas is sick. Based largely on sun worship and Scandinavian pagan ritual, Christmas in some form has been with us for thousands of years. Christians muscled in on an existing winter solstice festival, slapped their prophet on the front cover, claimed a rather unlikely virgin birth and beat up anybody with their large holy armies…
The recent fracas surrounding Zapiro’s drawing of the Prophet Muhammad has predictably culminated in the usual death threats from irate Muslims. Both the cartoonist and the newspaper’s editor apparently have to die for daring to express their opinion in a theoretically free country. I think it may be worth examining both why Zapiro decided to…
Being a South African over the past few weeks has been a turbulent experience. The excitement of the looming Fifa World Cup has been tempered by a degree of racial polarisation not seen since the apartheid era. Instigated largely by Julius Malema’s inflammatory style and culminating in the murder of Eugene Terre’Blanche, this polarisation has…
In March of 1991 after months of nationalistic propaganda and other divisive rhetoric from Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman, a small group of Serbs and Croats clashed in the Plitvice Lakes National Park on the border between these two countries. Serbs had moved into the park and expelled the park management. Zagreb viewed this as…
The name Zanu-PF used to be synonymous with liberation as was the ANC. It used to stand for the high ideals of fighting oppression at great cost to those who lead the fight. Across the globe, liberated, free-thinking societies and the media institutions that represented their views stood by Zanu-PF as they have stood by…
Government, it seems, wants to control our access to porn on DSTV. Thank goodness we have them to look out for us. We are clearly not capable of making these complex moral decisions all by ourselves. We are the rabble, the electorate and all we understand are those empty campaign promises. We love those flashy…
Every so often we are faced with a news story that divides opinion and causes heavy debate. In these cases, emotion often rules supreme and otherwise pleasant people become laptop dictators demanding justice and punishment. They seldom know more than the basic public stance, cry righteous indignation without a semblance of objectivity, and the baying…
Heritage Day for most people was a day to celebrate. Braais were going, music was playing and people chilled at home or at events around the country. For some, however, Heritage Day was pretty miserable and heritage night and the entire long weekend was worse and was spent in the dark. That’s because City Power…
I honestly don’t think I can stomach another indignant person imploring “the West” to “do something about Zimbabwe”. This gem is usually delivered on the back of some hack thesis about the hypocritical invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to free them from dictatorships whilst leaving poor old Zimbabwe languishing under Mugabe. Next is generally the…
