No Easy Answers

Here is to a meaningful women’s month to us all. Beyond the rhetoric and seminars, may we have the conversations we should be having around all the challenges that make up what it means to be a woman in the 21 st century. There are too many issues to list here but I will mention a few anyway: rape, sexual objectification, glass ceilings, patriarchy, abuse, self-hatred and whatever battles we fight daily simply because we were born female. It is ridiculous to say the least that we can’t jog in the mornings without being murdered. It is preposterous that a young girl can’t walk home after school without being raped and it is absolute ludicrous that mothers get raped in the passages of their own homes! Yet we live with these things daily. We live in constant fear for our lives. We cross the street when we see a man coming down the same way as us; we live to bring down the next woman because ‘who does she think she is?’; and we are constantly on the look-out for date-rape drug...

    Freedom day- again. Wasn’t it Freedom Day just last month? Oh, wait. No, sorry. That was Human Rights Day.   Same difference, right? All these public holidays are the same anyway. No school/work. Yay! Party hard the night before, sleep in, hit the malls, braai and drink with ama-genge, dread school/work then sleep. I fall in a generation that may or may not know why we even commemorate this day- funny because we are the generation with the most access to information. Perhaps that is our downfall- excessive access. But that is a whole different matter on its own. We’ll explore it on another day. Another public holiday, perhaps? This year’s Freedom Day comes on the back of several weeks of tension and pain born of the xenophobic attacks (aka Afrophobia) in the country that we have either witnessed or been involved in. We had to bear the shame of having the world, and more importantly, Africa, see the chickens of our frustration and dwindling hope come hom...