Opinion
LitNet contributors voice their opinions about current affairs.
We are a country in waiting
2018-02-08"The postponement of SONA is a metaphor for where we are as a country. We are a country in waiting. The dreams of 1994 and our hopes as citizens have been deferred. Again."
The advent of fee-free education and the future of universities in South Africa
2018-01-09"It has been long coming that as a country we follow in the footsteps of countries like Zimbabwe, Germany, Cuba and Libya, which provide free education. We can find the money, whether through belt-tightening, fighting corruption and illicit siphoning of funds from the country, and/or through increasing corporate tax."
Tribute to Keorapetse William "Bra Willie" Kgositsile
2018-01-09"You walked stride by stride with giants. And, when the time came, you returned to us, held our hands and helped us take baby steps."
#ANC54: Cyril the Silent
2017-12-19"For now it’s business as usual for the captured state. Ramaphosa will have to tread softly at least until the 2019 elections."
When Zuma goes by Ralph Mathekga: "Just before midnight" seminar
2017-12-04"South Africans need to get more involved in their public affairs and need to evaluate leaders more robustly."
“The problem with decolonisation”: Jonathan Jansen seminar
2017-11-30"The tools that you use are as important as the problems we are trying to solve. And if you use the wrong conceptual apparatus for making sense of problems like racism, like decoloniality, then, of course, I think you will be less effective than if you, for example, use critical race theory."
Revolution à la Zimbabwe
2017-11-22"Whereas mother nature caused the failing French wheat harvests, father Mugabe was responsible for the shortage in Zim through chasing away those who produced the wheat."
The volksmoeder, ordentlikheid and whiteness
2017-11-09On 6 November, the launch of Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa took place in Cape Town. Christi van der Westhuizen, author of Sitting Pretty, was in conversation with Adam Haupt. Read a broad overview of the main discussion points and also listen to the entire discussion.
Durban first city on the African continent to become a Unesco World City of Literature
2017-11-01"This is big. In a sense it means that Durban becomes the literary capital of Africa, the literary gateway to Africa. Everything that the city plans from now, literature must be at its heart."
Aardklop 2017: A Kwaitopedia of Afrikaans terms and phrases
2017-10-19"Using Kwaito as an entry point, Nou Die Las is an exercise in recollecting, defining and reclaiming Afrikaans and associated dialects, such as Tsotsitaal, as part and parcel of township culture."
Ryk Hattingh: A tribute to my friend
2017-10-12"Ryk Hattingh was fearless and melancholy and caring and mad and good and contrary and generous, and had more originality in his little finger than most people have in a lifetime."
Afrikaans: the language of dissent
2017-10-11"The language also bears the imprint of a fierce tradition of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, of an all-embracing humanism and anti-apartheid activism."
ARTiculate Africa 2017: On bended knee, we fight back
2017-10-11"My pen is my machine gun. My words are my bullets. I committed myself a long time ago that I shall use my words to fight injustice wherever it shows up."
Images of the black youth in two poems by Wally Serote and Njabulo Ndebele, viz: “My brothers in the streets” and “The revolution of the aged”
2017-09-19"Both Wally Serote and Njabulo Ndebele are literary aficionados who initially cut their political teeth in the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, whose tenets entailed self-love, self-reliance and cultural affirmation."
Langston Hughes: The people’s poet who revolutionised the African-American literary tradition
2017-09-12"Hughes was no ivory tower type of intellectual. He was a true cultural revolutionary who celebrated the beauty of ordinary people, whose experiences he sought to centre."
Sarah Lotz on writing, plot twists, and a BBC TV series
2017-09-08"I write every day, all day. I stop at five pm for a couple of hours to walk the dogs. I don’t write down ideas for new projects. The good ones tend to stick; the others go to the great idea landfill in the sky."
Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane’s "My cousin comes to Jo’burg" and "A present for my wife" as trickster tales
2017-09-06"In both stories under discussion, Mzamane has deployed two formidable twin pillars – trickery and humour – in order to effectively recapture specific moments of the black experience under apartheid rule. Not all those moments were characterised by gloom and doom. Some of them were as exhilarating as they were daunting."
Historical monuments: an interview with Lize van Robbroeck
2017-09-06"There are ways of owning Afrikaner culture that is not sectarian and offensive."
The Dalai Lama in Botswana: an interview
2017-08-10"A local neuroscientist from Pretoria, Karen Fitzgerald is one of the organisers of a conference that will be held in Gaborone, Botswana, which His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama will attend. With this historic visit by the Dalai Lama, Botswana is his only planned destination in Africa."
The Artscape Women's Humanity Arts Festival: an interview
2017-08-03The Artscape Women’s Humanity Arts Festival is an annual event, now in its 11th year. Woman Zone is an organisation that has its home and Woman’s Library at Artscape. The festival takes place from the 2nd to the 12th of August 2017.