Imported French ingredients, fine wine and rare cigars are to the political and business elite what diamond-encrusted platinum pendants the size of hubcaps are to rappers: a way to flash your newly acquired squillions and your exquisite taste –the culinary equivalent of bling.
Superintendent Joe Odendaal’s old-fashioned courtesy and gentle air belie his track record as a tough cop who gets things done. "What does safe mean? One incident is one too many," he retorts dismissively. "We are not interested in sitting around patting ourselves on the back. Our goal is to achieve a crime-free area, and we need to improve continuously to get there."
At an age when most people are enjoying a quiet retirement, Reshoketswe Mabulelong has started not just a new career but one which finds her wading across muddy building sites in a hard hat, shouting orders at men. "No, no, you can’t ask my age, just say I am a senior citizen," says Mabulelong sternly.
‘Whenever we see a picture of a refugee it is always someone lying on the ground with flies on their face!" exclaims Dosso Ndessomin. Ndessomin (42) is tired of the portrayal of refugees as passive victims, with endless needs and nothing to offer. The reality is vastly different, he says, and he should know: he came to South Africa from Côte d’Ivoire as an asylum seeker in 1994.
The advent of democracy saw Franschhoek, the model Afrikaner village of apartheid mythology, ill prepared to deal with transformation. Under apartheid the dream of a "pure" white town had seen the forced removal of 40 coloured families who had owned homes there, and the creation of a separate coloured municipality, with a buffer zone of farms in between.
”Maybe it was inevitable that as the child of a reborn God-botherer and a misanthropic atheist, I might end up a little spiritually perplexed. My grandmother, a stout-hearted Matabeleland farmer, read her gilt-edged Bible every night, but was known to call in a nyanga (traditional healer) when necessary”, writes Nicole Johnston.
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/ 23 December 2005
As the first dizzy flush of post-1994 rainbow nationism wears off in South Africa, ethnic minorities like the Chinese and the Portuguese are reaching deeper into their cultures for their identity. Lessons for the children of minorities, where they are taught their own traditions in their own languages, are burgeoning.
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/ 9 September 2005
The road to Shiluvari, situated between Polokwane and Makhado, formerly part of the Bantustans of Venda and Giyani, doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it to tourists at first glance. It has its fair share of arid land eroded by the ubiquitous goats, flanked by potholed dirt roads.
South Africa’s decade-old democracy presents us with many confounding questions about the nature of our freedom and our relationships with one another. Deep divisions of race, class, language, culture, religion, income and education persist and, in some cases, have even increased. In the midst of this, gender sometimes gets lost despite being possibly the most important aspect of identity.
After the successes of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s an inevitable backlash followed and still continues: feminists are man-haters, anti family values and tyrannical arbiters imposing their values on other women. Feminists are merely women making their own choices about how to invest their time.