Thought Leader

By WR Terblanche Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying…

Dear Dooses You know who you are. This guy is a doos. So is this one, and this one, and these cops, these nurses, this teacher, this radio DJ, this spokesman and this pastor. At least two of our neighbouring countries are run by dooses of awe-inspiring dimensions. Noseweek should be retitled “Doos Monthly”. There…

By Guy Chennells This article is in continuation of a debate that I must admit I’ve only partly followed. It’s about race and being South African. If you know what you’re going to say in response already, this is not for you. If you feel a gnawing hunger for an unsure offering, like it’s a…

It was 1994 and a Canadian comic at a South African festival thought that given our apartheid history, he’d be edgy by poking fun at race. He got mere titters and derisory silences from the audience. He didn’t realise: we got race. We South Africans had been through race, come back and turned it inside…

Remember the good old days when it was only “geniuses” who could get the editor of a newspaper to print their garbage and enjoy some sort of mass circulation? It was either that, or their father knew a producer on a radio station or at a television network who was willing to air their “interesting”…

What’s in a word? Quite a lot, sometimes, and not a helluva lot other times. But who’s to say? Several years ago, one of my dearest of friends, AGRB, was accused of being a spy for the apartheid state. I knew that the accusation was baseless, so did most of our colleagues in the media….

By Marthe van der Wolf Being black and having an Afro most of my life, I heard this once too often. Probably every black person in the Netherlands has been called a “Black Piet” at least once in his or her life. Especially in the weeks prior to December 5. It hurts, it always has…

By Max Rayneard I’m a white South African, admittedly seated in a coffee shop in upstate New York where I teach African anglophone literature to American students, but wanting desperately to be home. I agree with Andile Mngxitama’s characterisation of whites “dealing” with complicity as something akin to a pastime: something one does now and…

Last night I attended a planning meeting for #occupysandton the Johannesburg branch of the occupy movement that is spreading around the world. It began on Wall Street with a focus on the greed that has begun to characterise the economic order, and the inequality between the 99% and the 1%. They call themselves “a horizontally…

Just north of here, the tree of liberty is being liberally watered — not with the blood of patriots, but with the blood of blacks. And also unlike Jefferson’s dictum, it isn’t just occasionally, but has been going on for months. The vigilantes have even given themselves a name “The Brigade for Purging Slaves and…