CBC radio 1’s Jian Ghomeshi conducted a “rare” interview with Jason Russell of KONY2012 fame this week. Russell, who is on some kind of media tour (he indulged the most prominent British media outlet in an interview that was an embarrassment to that paper, a few days ago and now Canada of course) remains brazen […]
By Melissa Levin The next time Peter Beinart, who wrote a post on “The Israel Debate in South Africa” for The Daily Beast, visits South Africa, he ought to spend more time, with more people, getting a deeper sense of the complexities of the country and its struggle history. He may learn then, for starters, that […]
By Melissa Levin It was in Yeoville sometime in the 1990s that a ‘spook’ from South Africa’s now ruling party, the ANC, with whom I was acquainted began asking me questions about my father. My family had migrated to Canada, which he knew, and he was asking questions like, “when,” and “was your dad ever […]
The Globe and Mail ran with an article this weekend titled “In case you missed it: This is the African Century”. If anyone is getting excited by the sarcasm oozing from the headline, anticipating a scathing critique of the hope/ful/less cliché of African futures, let me assure you that your enthusiasm is misplaced. In the […]
The sprawling Toronto Zoo clearly never heard about the controversy surrounding the German Augsburg Zoo’s experience of setting up an “African village” in the summer of 2005. If they had, perhaps they would’ve been more circumspect before hosting one of their own.
What is it with the conviction, that you can save yourself and the world by shopping? Last week the tony Canadian chain, Holt Renfrew, began selling “the bag that can change the world.” For just $50, consumers can purchase a Tory Burch designed sack, some of the proceeds of which will go to feeding hungry African children. Feeding hungry children, wherever they may be, is a noble cause. But the persistence in undergirding a system that starves them in the first place detracts from the gesture.
I swore I wasn’t going to add a thing to the discussion about the idiotic poster campaign by the student/youth wing of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance about a future non-racial love-fest. I have remained shtum (yiddish for ‘quiet’) about its horrid aesthetics, its awful family snap-shot quality. (Some have claimed it’s like a Benetton […]
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio 1’s program, The Current, this morning interviewed 40 year old Nkosinathi Biko about South Africa’s progress (and his dad’s legacy) 22 years after the unbanning of liberation movements (2 February 1990).
Nelson Mandela elicits divergent, incorrect and unrealistic reactions among his detractors and supporters.
At best they express an acute deficiency in generosity. A little worse is the ignorant display of ahistory. But the most irritating for me of specially the (UK) Guardian’s pre-ANC centenary commentary is the inability to reposition their lens from caricatures of African political life.
