Singers Victoria Kimani from Kenya, South African Judith Sephuma, Waje from Nigeria, Vanessa Mdee from Tanzania, Arielle T from Gabon, Gabriela from Mozambique and Selomor Mtukudzi from Zimbabwe have now recorded Strong Girl to address the gender inequality that they believe goes hand-in-hand with poverty. Read it at the M&G. Image – Vanessa Mdee, Victoria…
Author: Mail & Guardian
Back in the 1950s Frank Sinatra sang about how love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. But these days, for some couples, love seems to be able to get by pretty well on its own. There’s less social pressure on people to tie the knot. And, given the cost, people have to…
As a young journalist in Johannesburg in the early 1990s, I wrote a story about South Africa’s looming HIV crisis, citing predictions from epidemiologists that, without urgent action, cases could top five million by 2000. That seemed an impossibly large number at the time, but unfortunately those predictions came true. A combination of government neglect,…
With less than a year left until the deadline for countries to reach the millennium development goals set by the United Nations, the majority of women in South Africa are not benefitting from gains made in terms of gender equality. This is in part caused by gender-based violence, according to the Commission for Gender Equality….
It seemed inevitable that Nigerian-German singer Nneka would make a roots trip album. The 34-year-old accompanied Damian Marley and Nas on their 2010 Distant Relatives tour, a project that updated a well-trodden route of Caribbean to African awakening with a punchy, hip-hop-moulded attitude. This enthusiasm has been manifested within Nneka and so My Fairy Tales…
Kagiso Lesego Molope has won the English Academy of Southern Africa’s Percy Fitzpatrick prize for youth literature for her novel This Book Betrays My Brother (Oxford University Press, 2012). Describe yourself in a sentence. Township post-apartheid author. Describe your ideal reader. Everyone. There’s always something to learn from books no matter what your background, and…
Evocatively and provocatively themed “A Woman’s World”, this year’s European Film Festival explores this alternative vision by screening 12 internationally acclaimed films, each from a different European country, at Cinema Nouveaus countrywide from May 9 to 18. The theme has the potential to inspire, reawakening questions that feminist critics have posed for decades, such as…
Tammy-Ann Julies* remembers “feeding” her eldest son alcohol for the first time about two years ago. It was a late Friday afternoon and the then eight-year-old Owen* and his mother shared a 750ml bottle of Black Label beer. They were sitting in the houthok [wooden shack] that Julies (30) and her husband (36) had built…
Women earn nearly a third less than men on average in South Africa, according to the latest tax statistics published by the South African Revenue Service (Sars). In 2013, the average taxable income for women was R193 908 a year, or about R16 000 a month. Men earned on average R254 347 a year, or…
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström’s modus operandi has been regarded as something of a departure from the realpolitik style of diplomacy. The outspoken Social Democrat has, on the odd occasion, been compared to Olof Palme, Sweden’s charismatic yet divisive prime minister who succumbed to an assassin’s bullet in 1986. A recent Guardian editorial called her…
The ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) has lost patience with the ANC Women’s League. It was reprimanded for failing to run political programmes that benefit women, being unable to raise its own funds and for its poor state of organisation. One of the main causes of the league’s state of disarray is apparently a succession…
Sindiswa Khubeka* from Sea Point in Cape Town will save more than R4 500 over the next five years on tampons and pads after she bought a set of washable sanitary towels for R205 in July last year. Khubeka (36) started using the towels when she got involved in a programme that distributes the products…
Phumla Ndlovu’s* partner Xolile Silo* started drinking at nine that Monday morning. He then left their house in Roodepan township, near Kimberley in the Northern Cape, and headed for the local tavern. It was just weeks ago: March 23. “I was lying on the couch watching TV when he came back later that evening,” Ndlovu…
When I was five years old, I hid in our spare bathroom and tried to wee standing up. After all, that’s how all my friends did it. Except me; I had to sit down. This upset me. I just wanted to be like my friends. I imagined wowing them all the next day when I,…
The girl was raped by her own father over a period of eight years. She bore him two children during that time and no adult intervened or helped her, not even relatives who knew what was happening. Eventually she mustered the courage to report her plight to the police and the man was charged. But,…