“Every Thursday morning as we arrive at the river to fetch water, the old woman would line us up at the banks, instruct us to lie on the ground legs wide open, as she takes turns inserting her fingers inside us to certify those that are still virgins, or identify those who aren’t” I […]
The greatest lesson I have learnt in my entire life took place when I was 15 years of age. A guest speaker had come to my school at the time and came to speak about empathy. The simple dictionary definition for empathy states that it is the ability to understand and share the feelings of […]
These hands belong to my granddaughter Sitarah who is 8 years old – she visited her dad’s family at Eid and came home with beautiful painted hands – her dad is muslim. Her mother is my daughter whom I raised in a spiritual, non-religious home where all religions are embraced as we follow a non-dogmatic […]
I had never known the true meaning of Ubuntu until I went to university. I grew up in a middle-class Anglican Xhosa home which meant that the entirety of my existence was sheltered. I went to church and came straight home. And being that I went to a private, predominantly-white girls’ school, I had never […]
We were like a fish in water. A fish does not know that he swims in water. It is what he has experienced his whole life. He was born into water, it is all he knows. We were born into the Apartheid system, we did not know anything different. Black people lived in townships, they […]
In the wake of an often hostile society and my own tumultuous inner landscape, I stumbled across what would inform the rest of my life. It was a Monday, 2016 and I was heartbroken. And when I say heartbroken, I mean it, gut wrenching, tear jerking, broken hearted. My friend had convinced me to tag […]
As ordinary people, we have decided to declare 1 December 2017 a day on which we formally and intentionally free ourselves from mental slavery. We invite you to do the same on this historic day and every day thereafter. Even before slavery was abolished in the Cape Colony on 1 December 1834, most people already […]
How do we begin to heal as a nation? How do we begin to truly ‘see’ each other? Sharing the pain, sharing the hurts, getting angry? We are all wounded in different ways – we carry the pain in different ways and we express it in different ways! In the movie ‘Colour of Fear’ (a […]
Many years ago, when I was growing up in the very divided central city of Jos in Nigeria, I was rushing to catch the early morning bus to the university one day when I encountered an experience that was to transform my, then, very narrow perspective about life. Jos is located right in the middle […]
“Yesterday I felt like an idiot. I was in a manual car trying to get up a hill in a traffic jam. The robots were out in Jan Smuts. It was hot and a rancid smell of decaying rubbish bothered me. As I looked around to locate it source, I noticed smoke wafting up between […]