Mmusi Maimane’s been having a bad time of it. But are the critics barking up the wrong tree? “Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable.” – Toni Morrison For the last few weeks, Mmusi Maimane has been subjected to pretty rough treatment at the hands of a number of prominent black people. The Twitterati had their …
The real critique of last night’s SONA is not that it was boring, it is that the speech was boring on purpose because it sought to depoliticise meaningful things and subsume them under the rubric of “fast-tracked implementation” “stakeholder engagement,” and “delivery mechanisms.” In other words, Zuma deliberately deployed technical language that alienates people to …
LONDON — As a gay man living in Nigeria, my biggest challenge was choosing between my sexuality and my job. In 2004, I was at the start of my acting career. I had just left university, and I was featured in “Roses and Thorns,” a prime-time soap opera on Galaxy Television, one of Nigeria’s most …
As the sun sets in the West, the sea beyond Port-au-Prince turns a dreamy orange. This view of the ocean from Haiti’s downtown capital can seem tranquil, but for tens of thousands of restavek children dusk marks a deepening nightmare. One of these girls is 9-year-old Ana. I met Ana while working with restaveks and …
Limpho Hani is often visibly angry about the assassination of her husband. Twenty-one years later, she refuses to forgive or forget. In fact, she bristles with rage when the subject of her husband comes up. The loss of her husband, the father of her children, is not something she is prepared to approach gently. She …