Unraveling..

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...