The history and lives of South Africans are beset with ironic contradictions. As the saying goes: the more things change, the more they stay the same. In my life time alone, I have witnessed a white supremacist system of oppression obsessed with race replaced with an Afrocentric socialist system fixated on achieving equality through racial quotas.Left-wing racialist agendas have now completely conquered my erstwhile homeland and this system gets re-elected time and again despite its obvious and dangerous failings. Its re-election is mostly riding on a catalogue of grievances against the white community cynically exploited by black nationalist parties such as the African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters. Some of them are genuine grievances, but others are simply divisive inventions and the antithesis to the non-racial society envisioned by well-meaning South Africans during the transition period from minority rule to democracy.
Category: Identity
Anyone who has read me knows full well that I can’t bear the identitarian politics bandwagon and increasingly I’ve been arguing this is a middle class issue. This is a personal monologue and will need refining over time but for the time being this is what I think it’s all…
The CRED report is a brave but necessary one in terms of education, a field in which too often policy changes are advanced based on gross generalisations made from anecdotal evidence and experience and unevidenced assertions about what is taught.
No matter how advanced we regard our society; no matter how ignorant we perceive our forebears; no matter how comfortably we enjoy our lives, one of the most devastatingly cliché human questions still haunts us, and becomes ever harder to answer: who are we?
The current hyperbolic preoccupation with race in the Anglosphere has provided an opportunity for some to link caste to race as though they are cognate phenomena of oppression. The depiction of Brahmins as the epitome of whiteness at the apex of the Indian caste system, is actually generated from within the same western framework that treats race as a salient difference.
The online mob of commentariats have again got their high-handed politically correct digits in a twist over the ongoing storm concerning white actors performing roles that they deem should be played by non-whites. In August, Scarlett Johansson got into hot water when she proclaimed that an actor should be allowed…
Martin Parr is a delightful photographer. His bright, sweet shop sense of colour oozes fun, humour, eccentricity and a sense of optimism in being Only Human, the name of this solo exhibition of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. The show is grouped into themes, from capturing members of hobby…