The nation’s GDP growth has barely crawled at an average of 1.2% annually since 2008. Concurrently, GDP per capita has regressed by about R3,000 over this span. This decline is palpable in tightening budgets, vanishing jobs, and growing disillusionment. A pervasive sense of decline is eroding the national spirit.
Music is an immutable part of the human experience. Song and rhythm have captured our joys and heartaches, celebrated our achievements, mourned our failings and expressed our connection with the divine. Music has also been used to stir our feelings, and to rouse us to action: the beating of a drum to signal the march to war, the sounding of a trumpet for a cavalry charge, the anthem of a country or the melodies that serve as the soundtracks to history.
This is really a reflection on the virtue of being less than wholly convincing, or convinced, and thus avoiding the penalty of bringing the argument to a close.
Julius Malema did it again – he threatened genocidal violence as a crowd cheered him on. Somewhere, a hypothetical Oom Frikkie also displayed the 1928 South African flag on the back of his bakkie again. Are these two phenomena akin? What should be the limits of freedom of expression?
South African education is under attack. The attack is against our few remaining good schools, not against the majority of bad schools. Most South African schools have failed horribly, delivering just about the worst literacy rates on Earth and the worst results in maths and science. These are the schools that the vast majority of our children, black and poor, attend. These are the state schools falling under the ANC government. They are the schools that meet the ANC’s Employment Equity target, with 92% of the teachers being black (to match the national demographics). These schools are not under attack.