Fiat Lux
August 4 2016 South Africans went to the ballot box this past week to elect local councilors in what was described as a hotly contested election presenting the ruling African National Congress (ANC) with its stiffest challenge since the end of Apartheid. Indeed, early trends in the tallying of the votes indicated that the ruling party was struggling in places like Gauteng as the Democratic Alliance (DA) looked like a…...
July 10 2016 Don’t you worry, sir, I will of course write about Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, who left us this past week. He is the man who made us of a certain generation feel like we had a big brother who would “whup” the Big Ugly Bear that dared bully us, whoever that was. And did we love the “Chump” or did we love him. He beat all the…...
July 7 2016 This past week has witnessed a resurgence of Israel’s diplomatic activity within the Eastern African region with the high-profile visit of the Jewish state’s prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu (“Bibi”), to a number of our countries. The occasion of his visit was made to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the famous “Raid on Entebbe” in which Bibi’s younger brother, Yonatan, was killed when he led an Israeli…...
May 26 2016 – Another example of my romance with T-shirts with catchy words in my youth came from Paris, and it went (my translation): “They all notice when I’m drunk but not when I’m thirsty.” Obvious, wouldn’t you say? It sure would be a crazy world if people went around looking at other people and saying, “Hey, you look thirsty; what’s the matter with you?” First, in our overly…...
May 12 2016 – The reader may still remember the nickname “La Pasionaria” I wrote about a few years ago in this space. Well, she was that Spanish woman who stood at burning barricades in 1930s Madrid, under the fire of the fascists under General Francisco Franco, and urged the republican resisters with the immortal words, “No Pasaran!” They Shall Not Pass! Her real name was Isidora Dolores Ibarruri Gomez,…...
April 7 2016 It was a foregone conclusion; it was not going to succeed, and it sure as hell failed. The move by a section of the South African parliament to impeach President Jacob Zuma over the so-called Nkandla scandal was always going to flop, because of the lopsidedness of the House, which still has a huge majority of African National Congress (ANC) members. The political organization which spearheaded the…...
April 4 2016 – Two years have gone by, and still no end in sight for the ordeal that has been meted out to the so-called Chibok girls. These are the unfortunate young women who were abducted en masse – more than 250 of them — from a school in north-eastern Nigeria. The dramatic abduction set off a global outrage as political leaders and other public individuals and bodies called for…...
March 24 2016 – The utterly senseless devastation that terror visits on its victims is horrendous to behold. Scenes of women, children and babies dead or dying, some screaming and wailing, covered by others’ body parts, are bound to remain etched in the memories of those who behold them for the rest of their lives. These are blind and indiscriminate acts that target no one and everybody at the same…...
It’s official, it is not working, it just isn’t. It is this election thing that I’m talking about. It clearly is not working for us at all though, like the proverbial madman, we keep repeating the same thing the same way every day, expecting different results. Whomsoever introduced elections to Africans was either ill-informed about our fundamental philosophical infrastructure or ill-intentioned and wishing us to be stuck forever in a…...
Pardon me if I’ve already told you this one, but it’s a favourite of mine from a film I watched as a young man. It was based on Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”, and starred Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Two young English adventurers arrive at the gate of some Western Asian town, probably occupied by the Pashtun. This is an area forever in thrall to the…...
