Posted inEqualityLifestyle

The hair debate must end

While watching Gillian Schutte’s documentary “It’s my hair … I bought it”, I thought the hair debate must come to an end. It’s banal and redundant. Talking about black women’s hair needs to stop being a question of national importance. Our hair is not all of who we are. Why have I never seen a […]

Posted inNews/Politics

The Marikana Files

Social Justice Journalist and Filmmaker, Sipho Singiswa, takes us inside Marikana to meet the miners and community members who live in the impoverished settlements around the Lonmin Mining operation. He also interviews Head Researcher of the Bench Marks Foundation David Van Wyk on the issue of socioeconomic transgressions that this community is forced to deal […]

Posted inNews/Politics

If whiteness can’t be unlearned then black oppression is permanent

Many arguments have risen out of Gillian Schutte’s “Dear White People” perhaps the most progressive provided by Jackie Shandu in “Black people, fight your own battles”. Shandu argues that because Schutte’s letter is addressed to white people, it ought to be dismantled and dissected primarily by the white community who it seeks to engage in […]

Posted inNews/Politics

Rescuing whiteness

Well before Gillian Schutte’s letter to white people calling on them to reflect on their whiteness, its invisibility and centrality in the reproduction and edification of white power, the very experience of blackness has been characterised by this same demand. Yet, as is wont to be the case, it would be Schutte’s, a white woman, […]

Posted inGeneral

Dancing to the tune of whiteness?

By Sipho Singiswa Almost 19 years after the 1994 election, institutionalised racism against indigenous African people has remained intact and largely unchallenged. The majority of Africans still live in poverty with very little access to land, housing, basic quality education, clean water and decent primary healthcare. All this is in violation of the much-praised South […]