For anyone keen to read the actual columns in question that brought in a (joint) win as best columnist Western Cape in Vodacom’s Journalist of the Year Awards, I’ve posted them here.
With Teeth, is a regular fixture in The Big Issue, which supports the homeless and unemployed by providing them with a hand-up not a hand-out.
I’m thrilled to say it’s the second year in a row that the column has won the category.
• “Pest Control” looks at how Jacob Zuma might want to consider implementing an updated campaign against The Four Harms ala Mao Zedong. Only, whereas Chairman Mao declared war against sparrows, flies, mosquitoes and rats, the focus of the ANC President’s pest control programme is on tackling scorpions, weaselly former associates, bearish big business and, of course, putting down those mad mongrel dogs of the media.
• “Privacy” examines how Facebook and social networking sites have us willingly dishing up personal and sensitive information on our religious beliefs, political leanings and sexuality for free that oppressive governments would have paid a pretty penny for during the reign of the Stasi or Special Branch.
• “Mugabe is the next Al Gore” puts forward everyone’s favourite dictator for the role of global anti-consumerism campaign hero in the wake of last year’s riots in Zimbabwe, price-slashing and empty supermarket shelves.
Full columns after the jump…
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I just got fabulous news from Tania, who organised the inaugural Litblitz event at the Joburg Country Club and Baobab Bookstore in Long Street on Sunday past, that the event raised R7880!
The evening featured five minute readings from me, Finuala Dowling, Gus Ferguson, Hugh Hodge, Patricia Schonstein, my awesome coworkers Sarah Lotz and Sam Wilson, Epiphanie Mukasano and Mary Magdalene Yuin Tal of the Whole World Women Association, a xx chromosome refugee group who benefited from the evenings proceedings. (more…)
Once upon a time in a land much closer than you think, there was a terrible regime that threatened to tear the land asunder. You must understand that it didn’t start out as a terrible regime. No indeed, as these things so often do, it started out with the best intentions.
Newly liberated from foreign overlords, the regime wanted to build a better, brighter place. And they tried, in their own way, they really did. It just sort of slipped, the way things do, like dirty dishes piling up in the sink.
Only while the dirty dishes in your sink or mine might be crusted with dried bits of bolognaise sauce or maybe cemented porridge that you sort of have to chip off with a spoon, the regime’s dishes were soiled with human rights violations and repression and corruption and fear. And over the years – many years – it just got worse and worse. It’s amazing how quickly these things stack up. How hard those stains are to get off no matter how much you scrub and scrub.
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