Given South Africa’s stated commitment to multilingualism, you might not think that a requirement from one of the country’s universities that its students learn an indigenous African language would raise much alarm. Yet alarm has nonetheless been the reaction from a few unexpected quarters to the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s announcement that all first-year students enrolled […]
Late on Monday, the South African Mail & Guardian ran an online feature contrasting how local newspapers have been covering what’s become known as “Guptagate”, the unimaginative shorthand for the bi-national diplomatic and national security scandal unfolding around the Guptas, a wealthy South African family of Indian heritage, and their outsize influence over the country’s […]
Within hours of Adam Lanza shooting dead 20 Sandy Hook Elementary first-graders and seven adults, including his own mother, and taking his own life, media channels everywhere were festooned with analysis and opinion on what drove the 20-year-old to do it. Some blamed America’s gun culture and the free-availability of these weapons of mass massacre, […]
He performs to packed-out theatres and is a regular correspondent on a satirical television news show, Late Nite News with Loyiso Gola (LNN) on South African private TV channel, Etv. He’s at times raucously funny and almost always on point. He writes, he tweets and he tjunes white okes (for the non-South Africans: he gives […]
Silence in a relationship speaks volumes and in the relationship between the governing African National Congress and the South African news media, the former’s stony silence about the Mail and Guardian’s recent spread into the finances of Jacob Zuma, president of the party and the nation, is a voluble reminder of the history of hostilities […]
