Unraveling..

Happiness is a journey not a destination. You will not be happy in 10 years if you don't consciously choose to be happy everyday from today. There is no point in life when someone can say I no longer have sadness, only happiness. There’s is no point in life when someone can say “I have finally arrived at happiness”.  Just as sure as there is life and death, there will always be sadness and happiness, both are just part and parcel of what it means to be human. And just like we have to make the choice each day to live and live well we must choose to be happy everyday. There will always be empty and sad days, there will always be anger and betrayal. There will be pain and hurt even when you have all the material luxuries, even when you are old and grey. The sources of pain are just as natural a part of life as the sources of happiness. And they are always both present at all times. Most of the time however we only focus in on the ‘negatives’, on what we do not have. Who can even...

One of the verses or phrases from the bible that has always made me stop to think for a second is that which says that we were created in the image of God. I have had a bit of time to contemplate this statement and this is as far as I have come. Please bear in mind that I do not know half as much as I should know about the bible and I also know very little about life in general so these are just my idle time thoughts informed by my personal  journey. For a long time, this is how I interpreted that scripture; if God made man in his image, man being a generic term for the human race, God must be like me and everyone that I see in the world. So, since we live in a world that loves categories, God  would be Black, White, Asian, Coloured, Indian, European, man, woman and the list can go on and on. I held this belief for quite a while. When I awoke to the realization that inequality at the level of race, gender, sexuality etc was actually a reality and that it manifested in m...

What does it meant to be woke? What does it mean to #staywoke? Woke or being woke is defined by the urban dictionary as “being aware, knowing what is going on in the community”. It entails being aware of social injustices like racism, sexism, heterosexism or homophobia just to name a few. Being aware of social injustices and fighting against them is not a new concept, but the linguistic representation of this concept as “woke”, “being woke” or “staying woke” was first used in the USA, specifically in a song by Erykah Badu in 2008. It however gained most of its popularity after the Black Lives matter movement, formed to protest police brutality against people of colour and racism in general, used it as one of the slogans in their social media activism. The concept of being woke inevitably found its way to South Africa (don’t you just love the internet?). Being woke in South Africa is celebrated. It means you are conscious of the social issues the country or community is dealing...

So I am sitting here watching this show on which two black female South African celebrities are talking about women who have sugar daddies or ‘blessers’ – It pains me to describe these beautiful beings in this manner, but  I cannot deny the fact that to be understood in this world, we have to categories ourselves and others). One of the hosts had once upon a time had a sugar daddy or blesser, if you prefer, and was unpacking the blesser phenomenon together with the other. They were, as far as I could see, as I tuned into the show a little bit late, trying to paint a psychological picture of the phenomenon; how it must affect the mainly black women emotionally and mentally. They were also looking at physical impacts, and throughout the conversation, trying as hard as they could to not talk in a demeaning manner about women who practice this life style. They were saying a lot of the things that I had said myself many times: “oppressed people don’t always know that they are be...

I spent this week with some of the brightest minds on the continent, my fellow Mandela Rhodes Scholars. It was a five day workshop in which we thoroughly got to engage with the issue of reconciliation on many levels. Needless to say that I returned with a bag full of new lessons and another bag full of information that reinforced knowledge I had already acquired. I realized that I had to share some of these lessons with the people I have access to. The purpose of this blog therefore, is to share with you something that was reinforced within me, something I had begun to realize and implement in my own life, and something that is key in the journey to reconcile humanity; this lesson is the importance of what was referred to as the ‘reconciliation of self’. What is reconciliation of self? Based on the conversations we had, I was able to gather that reconciliation of self means taking a journey inwards, it means to ‘suspend’ everything you have come to know about the world around you an...

source - google When we come into this world, we are bare, free of clothing, of all of our societal rules, cultures, and education. We are naked. As soon as we are in this world we are rushed to be cleaned and wrapped in ‘warm clothing’ by well meaning doctors, midwives and other medical personnel. From that moment on our natural state of nakedness is hidden forever, taboo. We become forever ashamed of our very nature. We cannot bear to bare it all; it would be too much for society to handle. So we have created dress codes which instruct us to cover our bodies and on how to cover them. They tell us how much of our bodies we can expose at any one point in time. As we grow up, we learn these rules and most importantly we accept these rules with little or no questions asked.  We become obsessed with covering our bodies. When did it become so important to cover up, to hide? This is certainly not a thing of today, for humans have covered themselves in one way or another sinc...

Angélique Kidjo 'keeping it real' :) Angélique Kpasseloko Hinto Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin Kidjo a.k.a. Angélique Kidjo is a three time Grammy award winner this year for best world album. World music encompasses music from all over the globe featuring mainly genres that are not considered western like folk music, traditional/ethnic music. It can also be a fusion of western pop music and these other different styles. (I personally find this label “world music” problematic, but let’s discuss this in a different post). Her unique music has earned her praise like "Africa's premier diva" and she is one of the top 100 most inspiring women in the world according to The Guardi an . She has been all over the world doing all sorts of different things. She has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, Berklee C ollege of Music and Middlebury College , she has been the ambassador for UNICEF since 2002, starred in the Nollywood movie The CEO and...