Simply Philile

There are so many things that can be said of last week’s public Twitter spat between popular hip hop artist AKA and the mother of his child - the equally well-liked DJ Zinhle, who were both in Swaziland last weekend for the Bushfire festival.  I will deliberately not speak to the direct parenting deficiencies that stem from the separation of a child’s biological parents; I’ll obviously be heavily biased towards DJ Zinhle because of the way my life is set up in this regard. AKA is childish and immature for taking his most intimate feelings about his private life into the public space, some said. Others accused DJ Zinhle of the same after she responded fiercely to the fight started by AKA.  AKA started the fire when he lamented, to ever-supportive fans, about how the DJ won’t allow him to visit their child who stays with her even though he “paid for the child to have his surname”.  He also wailed about how Zinhle and her friends continuously harass his new...

I’m probably one of the most obnoxious people when it comes to my expression of the love I have for Africa and its people.  We’re concluding “Africa month” this week so please allow me to tell you an African story one more time because I just can’t help it; my short adult life has opened me up to such inspirational and lovely experiences of our continent.  Sadly, some of the lessons have come in painful packages like the so-called xenophobic attacks in South Africa and the genocide in Rwanda to mention a few - a brutal history whose deliberately positive take away for me is a renewed belief that our strength truly lies in our diversity. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was a 10 year old boy who taught a 22 year old me, a rookie journalist at the time, about Africa Day. My BFF Nomahlubi and I were visiting Zimbabwe, for the first time after she was invited to be part of judging panel for an event in the city of Bulawayo.  We stayed with the Mazibuk...

I seriously thought I’d sit this one out because I didn’t expect it would bother people the way it seems it has, so here goes nothing from my hashtag Blesser rant. Firstly, I’m baffled and struggling to comprehend why people are so shocked, mad, bitter, or confused and even excited by this whole Blesser phenomenon which is hogging a large chunk of social conversations lately.  Scratch that, it’s actually ALL conversations because this Blesser talk has come up a few times in our Financial Strategy class at the GIBS Business School.  I’m yet to figure out why I’m a tad irritated that most of my classmates are amused by the whole concept. Blessers are no more a part of our life now than they have been for many years. A screen shot of the Facebook Blesser Finder page advert. I’m probably as baffled as the health care workers I was with in the room when in a discussion about girls and ‘Transactional Sex’, a colleague, senior in the United Nations family, res...

I currently see no value in encouraging girls to preserve their virginity or ‘delaying sexual debut’ unless we are admitting to be a society that values abuse, inequality, discrimination and patriarchy.  There are just too many things that are wrong about encouraging girls (and not boys) about holding on to their virginity. I can only discuss a few of them within this limited space. Marriage? Firstly, remember Nqobile the 24 year old Masters graduate I spoke about a few weeks ago? Well, she ‘got saved’ at 14 years old and so decided it was a given that as a Christian, she would not have sex until she got married.  That’s the first problem for me – marriage. This speaks directly to attaching a female’s worth to sex; a sex object that should be guarded for sweet devouring by a man. This raises another problem, what are we saying to the lesbian girls who will not marry not because they are not interested in marrying a man but because they live in countries whe...

Earlier this week I woke up at 4a.m. and travelled over 600km to listen to young women speak about their struggles, victories, hopes and dreams for their future.  These young women aged between 13- 21 years shared important insights on shaping their futures; speaking about how they currently and in future should fit into community development, leadership, policy making and various other key areas of societal progress. However, at times it was quite difficult to listen to and digest what they were saying, not because I was too busy framing and re-framing English sentences to text a request for an extended column submission deadline to the editor of this newspaper, but because English is not our Africa mother.  Most of the girls, although confident in expressing their thoughts, struggled to do so effectively in English which they spoke in order to accommodate English speaking colleagues.  So maybe the girls’ messages were lost in translation at times. In ...

Firstly, congratulations to EFF leader Julius Malema for his BA degree graduation.  For me, it’s not even about the weight or meaning of the academic qualification but more about what this young man and his infant organization sell; they sell confidence and fearlessness in our life time and Malema has demonstrated exactly this with his university graduation this week. It’s key to note the confidence and fearlessness with the same importance as the phrase IN OUR LIFETIME because Malema’s story of a poor boy from the grassroots level of society, raised by a single [grand]mother, rising to become a powerhouse, is a story we have heard before but always remarkable, and to witness it IN OUR LIFETIME makes many people who are the target audience of the EFF buy into their campaign for economic freedom IN OUR LIFETIME.  Malema’s is also a story of a young man who faced many hurdles in the sometimes deadly game of politics but HE CHOSE not to be distracted or defined ...

I once wrote somewhere that in this day and age, we should be teaching children more about leadership rather than HIV/Aids (which in essence is teaching them about sex).  I still believe in these words that I publicly shared for the first time about four years ago. Before you throw your toys out of the cot, please note that I’m deliberately choosing to address the sexually transmitted kind of HIV in this article for the purposes of my larger argument about leadership, because after all, in Swaziland, like in many parts of Africa, the disease is mostly transmitted from one person to another via sex. There seriously should be many other useful life skills that ought to be taught from as early as 10 years old; the same age that is targeted for sensitizing (especially girls) to HIV/Aids prevention and care messaging.  We need new ways, new norms and stuff because we need to change the way we function as a society…we need to think outside of sexual reproductive heal...