The Acne to my melanin

The role of government and it's institutions needs to be reimagined if we are to create the future South Africans deserve. Instead of bureaucrats and career politicians making all the decisions, humanities practitioners, educators, community leaders and creatives must be invited to the table and their voices need to be heard. Many public institutions are under-utilized or undirected, one of them being the public library.  South Africa as a third world country, has a multitude of problems and many of them are linked to literacy, education and access to information and resources. The country has a poor reading culture and libraries run the risk of fading into obscurity. The increase in internet connectivity is not helping the situation. The public library needs to go through a reincarnation and be more than it ever was. The library of the future needs to be more than just a silent room frequented by the old and socially inept where one can get a book. The library of the future needs ...

Envy Envy, I often experience it. For different reasons and usually not for long, thankfully. One of the most peculiar sources of envy for me recently has been because of religious doctrine versus ethnic cultural practices. I sometimes wish for a life where the spiritual beliefs that anchor my soul did not conflict with the ethnic culture that is a great source of pride for me. I sometimes wish I lived in a community, or society that made being a devout follower of my faith easy. A land where the laws and norms made practicing my faith easy, or the default thing to do.   Practicing Christianity is difficult. Practicing Christianity as an African man who is fully aware of how Christianity was used as a tool for evil against my ancestors, and the rest of the world is DIFFICULT. Living in an African community that has certain cultural rites that are expected of me, cultural rites that overlap with the spiritual realm when I was raised as a devout Christian is difficult. One of th...

Trying to separate the art from the artist is one of those controversial things that people will never unanimously agree on. Like almost everything else in life, separating the art from the artist is circumstantial and the variation of those circumstances is dependent on your personal moral compass. With this concept being so heavily linked to your own moral virtue, this means that judgment and indictment of your character, as a person, are almost guaranteed. Rightfully so too, because your actions are the only things that we can use to evaluate your character and try to predict your conduct in the future. Determining who cannot be separated from their art is far easier than determining who can. Here is where people’s personal values play a significant role and it’s impossible to not judge people based on these positions. Where there is a ‘grey area’, then surely there must be a black and white on either side to complete the spectrum. There are situations where we should all be in co...