I have often heard one of my favorite speakers, Vusi Thembekwayo, exclaim “Black people judge success by the car you drive. Fact”. While not necessarily quantifiable, that statement certainly rings true in our townships. Hands up anyone who knows someone that drives a posh car but stays in a shabby looking place. Without counting hands,...
Tag: conversation
The Day I Drove A Bargain With My Ancestors …
A few days after I was hijacked in 2015, I sat in my flat, physically unhurt by the incident, not angry with the perpetrators and not stressed about losing my car but confused as to why izinyanya, my ancestors, would allow this thing to happen to their child and how something so dangerous could happen...
The Thing, and The Fight to Fall …
I have never been good at relationships. Particularly, I have never been good at romantic relationships. Something about them seems to me unnatural. Actually, a lot seems unnatural. There is the rushed togetherness. There is the relentlessly pursued sense of oneness. There is the expected sharing of the self, the packing into little conversations of...
Quattro Wins For R8: Chosen “WORLD PERFORMANCE CAR OF THE YEAR”
Audi caps its New York Auto Show appearance with a prestigious award bestowed upon its halo model – the new R8. It drives off with the most important award in the eyes of ZTR. With a total of four awards, the Audi R8 is the most successful model in the history of the World Car...
Indoda Yesimanje Manje (Modern Man)
When the resident office trickster, George, asked me to write on the modern man, I was very reluctant. In fact, I turned the piece in at the last minute because the word “modern” is devoid of meaning to me. Instead, I started thinking about manhood itself, and my very identity as a human being, as...
The Experience – Steven Onoja
Good morning readers. I’m writing you all from New York City where the trees are sprinkled with frosting and the air is thin and crisp. Every time I look around I can’t help but to think I’m in a painting, it’s surreal. I have captured a lot of content throughout the past few days,...
How I Came To Understand My Male Privilege By Experiencing Racism …
A few months ago, I was watching a documentary about the history of the formation of our country with my son . It touched on topics such as slavery, colonisation and apartheid. While we were watching he turned to me and asked, ‘Papa, why did white people do this to us?’ It is not that...
Ten Commandments for the Modern Man ….
Well, you see I have a lot of male friends. In fact, I can count the number of female friends I have on one hand. I’ve always been drawn to men. Even when I get to a mixed group of people, I always find myself gravitating towards the men. I find women strange and rather...
Happiness Is A Four Letter Word: The Men
The movie “Happiness Is A Four-Letter Word” opened a few weeks ago with record breaking stats in just 10 days. By all intents and purposes, the film – a screen adaptation of the book by the same name, written by Cynthia Jele – is a chick flick; the three leads are all women, namely, Nandi...
Leave It All Behind …
When I was a kid whose world was the distance between home and school, and the rest of the globe seemed more a theory than fact – I had always loved adventure movies. I dreamed of one day getting lost deep in some jungle with nothing but my Rambo knife and a sexy sidekick who’d...