One of the areas of racist behaviour that grates me the most is when a white person refers to the person working in their garden or looking after the upkeep of their house or perhaps watching their children as 'boy' or 'girl'. Especially when the person they are referring to is often older then them, but i think it should be a standard rule that once someone hits what 20? 18? they are no longer [...]
i am still slowly making my way through Steve Biko's 'I write what I like' and here is a passage that i marked a while ago from Chapter 8: Some African Cultural Concepts: One of the most fundamental aspects of our culture is the importance we attach to Man [by which i think he is referring to people as opposed to individual - brett] . Ours has always been a Man-centered society. Westerners have on [...]
This one will no doubt surprise and shock a few South Africans, but one of the highlights of my life was being a Spur waiter for five years, back when we didn’t know how offensive the logo potentially was: […]
My friend, Megan Furniss had these questions to help us get thinking and self-examining on this... If you are worried that you might be a little bit racist there are a few things you can do to check: # Do you have a natural (and unreasonable) expectation that everyone should be able to communicate with you in English? # Do you get irritated with Africa Time, because you haven’t taken public transport in a while [...]
Race is one of the big issues we are dealing with in South Africa [and in Americaland, and most probably in pretty much every other country in the world, right?] and there is still a lot of work to be done. The idea of this series came from my understanding that most of us have some kind of racism or prejudice towards other people, particularly those of other cultures or race - some are quite overt [...]
Just over a week ago, tbV and i spent five days on two houseboats with about 20 incredible people, mostly younger than me. Here are some of the guys: We lived together, we ate together, we read the bible and sang some worship songs together, we confessed some struggles and some sin and prayed for each other, we sat in silence for three hours and were just still and knew that He was God, we [...]
i mean, how can you not love that, right? Coming home to Cape Town was an easy one. But leaving Oakland was also a less easy one than we may have thought. It was surprising to both tbV and myself just how much like home it felt to us. Which was great. And had a lot to do with the people and some of the places. Especially getting to stay for a month with Aaron [...]
The other day i was on the bus coming back from camp chatting to someone and they spoke a line that sends electricity through my body [and not in a good way]. i think we were talking about my blog and the other person said something about, 'Giving them a voice.' i can never ever give anyone else a voice. i can recognise and acknowledge and make space for and step out of the way [...]
i recently discovered the incredibly gifted Dante who writes incredible micro poetry on his blog, Original-Dante. Thinking my poetry would definitely err on the macro side we decided to do a collaboration and use the same title to inspire two different poems and so here is my offering: THOUGHTS FROM THE BLENDER i gaze into the mirror and the person staring back at me is not you i cast my eyes across to your face [...]
You go away on a houseboat for a week, come back home, turn on your computer and it's like a paint factory sneezed all over Facebook. Or something like that. Actually the graphic on my buddy Steve Heineman's page expressed it best: And i think enough has been said from either side of the rainbow for me to need to add anything specifically about that, although i definitely have some deep sadness for some of [...]