Since Valentine’s Day everyone has been talking about the murder of Reeva Steenkamp, although rarely in those terms. We know that her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, shot her four times and killed her while she was behind a locked door in their bathroom in a gated estate. We know that he has a history of domestic […]
Post by Palesa Mazamisa* The heinous, brutal rape and subsequent slaughtering of Anene Booysen in South Africa’s Western Cape province has brought into the open, once again, the miry underbelly of our rainbow nation. At the heart of violence that Anene was subjected to, lies a bigger issue that South Africans wilfully shunt and ignore. This issue […]
A month after the BBC wondered if South Africans will ever be shocked by rape, the sadistic rape and murder of the 17 year old coloured working class woman, Anene Booysen, from Bredasdorp, a small town in the Western Cape, provoked nationwide outrage. As last week’s news reports (see here, here and here, for example) and social media traction indicate, […]
A year ago, there was some minor hullabaloo created when African students in India were not permitted in some bars. But yeah, it remained a minor tempest. Most likely, prevalent attitudes towards Africans (and dark-skinned people in general) in South Asia didn’t change. A few days ago, I heard about the sexual assault of a […]
Over the weekend, Geoffrey York, the Africa correspondent for the Canadian Globe and Mail (and apparently also the only correspondent for a major Canadian publication on the African continent) wrote, from Namibia, about the current Herero struggle for land, dignity, and reparations. The 1904–1908 German genocide against the Herero is considered by many to have […]
In case you missed it, the cop and lawyers show, “Law and Order,” opened its 13th season last week with a transparent plot based on the Dominique Strauss Kahn rape case. They didn’t even try hard: Roberto DiStasio, “ the odds-on favorite to be Italy’s next prime minister” and ”the head of the Global Economic Trust” is […]
Robert Thornton is an anthropologist who teaches at Wits University in South Africa. He also maintains a blog: An Anthropologist in South Africa. In this guest post, he gives his take on Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the Guinean-American hotel staff member who accused him of rape. What’s different here, from the thousands of other analyses you’ve read? […]
No not the bad Hollywood movie version with its fake set ups, but real life: The life of a hotel maid [in New York City] is not an easy one, with naked men flaunting their wares, verbal abuse, lecherous suggestions and personal hygiene standards that would shame a chimp. But thanks to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, things […]
Gregory Mann Guest Blogger I had to buy The New York Post this week. It’s something I never do because, as the letters page reminded me, it’s something of a Zionist rag. But Tuesday the cover caught my eye: a story called “Got it maid” claimed that people working for disgraced ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn […]
This may make for depressing reading with your breakfast, but there’s nothing new about the entrenched homophobia in South Africa, a place where men rape lesbians to “correct” them, a government minister last month refused to open a state-funded exhibition featuring photographic images of intimacy between gay women (the image above is an example), and […]
