Thought Leader

The inauguration of Advocate Lawrence Mushwana last week as the new chairperson of the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (ICC) came at a time when South Africa’s human rights record is at its lowest. Mushwana, who is the chair of South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC),…

Paul Hawken, writer of Blessed Unrest — How the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming (Penguin 2007), is an indefatigable speaker and champion for environmental justice, who gave more than a thousand talks on the environment in the course of 15 years, before writing the book….

I, like many, have been following the Oscar Pistorius saga on Twitter. The plethora of tweets on one topic is something that I have not seen before. Almost everyone seems to have an opinion, a view on what happened and how it went down, and some, maybe even most, have a verdict. Yesterday Pistorius was…

In November 2012, Malawi’s first female president, Joyce Banda, temporarily suspended anti-gay laws, urging debate. Instead of acknowledging these laws as inhumane, reports suggest that Malawi feared losing money from liberal Western donors who insist that sexual minorities be protected. Gay rights are in vogue for Western funders, the European Union has already given 1.8 million…

By Nadia Sanger The allegation of being “un-African” continues to be used in multiple ways by political leaders to delimit African identities under the guise of decolonisation. In news reports on President Zuma’s latest allegation against dog ownership and their treatment by black people, are a number of bizarre, and relatively normative, ideas of humans…

By Steven Hussey There are few topics as emotive as animal abuse. The daily evidence I can see of this is no farther than on my Facebook wall, with people calling for the senseless nuclear obliteration of China in support of some powerless petition to stop animal cruelty in rural areas there, of dogs in…

While in transit at Abu Dhabi International Airport recently world-renowned Professor Cyril Karabus from Cape Town was arrested and jailed over a child’s death that occurred 12 years ago. Although his trail is due to take place on November 20 his lawyers have not had access to the medical files and there is good reason…

Many of South Africa’s urban centres have a common and extremely worrying denominator – brightly coloured advertisements urging the public to visit a doctor of dubious origin for services ranging from the reconciliation of relationships, to increasing one’s sexual prowess, to what my local “doctor” advertises as “same-day abortions”. While all of these are worrying…

From various sources, located in different countries across the globe, I have received the message, in inverted commas, below, signed by China Mills. It concerns the suspension, from Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain, of Ian Parker, one of the best known and most influential critical psychologists in the world today, who is also a practising…

By Leonhard Praeg We all know that political liberals live in a la-la land that hovers, somewhat like a virtual reality, over the real geography of political time and space. For citizens of la-la land “freedom of expression” is the same in South Africa as it is in Zimbabwe as it is in New Zealand,…