Gather round children and hear “[all] Africans seem naturally networked to religion.” Bow thy heads in shame yea northern heathens for the “Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination, is part of the fabric of all African societies.” Heaven forbid you should get on your high horse and talk of gross generalizations swathed in the tropes of noble savagery and whatnot, for the Lord hath spoken and he sayeth unto thee: “Over the decades that I have traveled in Africa I have met only four African atheists”; that “[in Africa] God is invoked on every occasion, private or public;” and, in a critical new insight, that “[the cause of] wars … in Africa… is usually a dispute over land rights involving two communities that happen to be of different faiths.” 

A week ago the Huffington Post published an article written by Melissa Jeltsen on an increasingly familiar name in women’s activism in the Arab world. The article, entitled “Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American Activist, On the Power of Protest,” has a rather misleading title. The focus of the article was not really Ms. Eltahawy’s thoughts on protest in the context of the Arab uprisings, nor the struggles faced by many women. Instead, the article is about Ms. Eltahawy; her history, her supporters, her detractors, and the controversy that surrounds her and her actions. 

Post by Percy Zvomuya

When I was an adolescent I thought I was going to be a footballer. Instead, when I turned 13 I became a preacher. I told people about the great love that the Nazarene, Jesus Christ, had shown for humanity. But for what seemed the longest time, my becoming part of God’s team was prevented by a simple and yet very troubling question: is there football in heaven? 

I have seen them, gravid
& walking with the honey heaviness
of mothers round as plums,
ripe & stretched over fullness
& eager to meet what kicks
beneath their hands

they have felt fluttering
in the domes of their bellies,
laughed with those turns
& learned new heartbeats
threading under their own,
a welcome otherness

but here, underneath scars
that tethered us
to our own mothers
a threat blooms alongside hope

this close to life death happens. obscene
how bodies break & empty easy as eggs
even in their fruiting

life is cheap
they say & it must be
if it spends so casually
each lost heartbeat
adds up
counted in pennies

& we keep adding
shiny words explaining loss:
religion, cultural context,
mismanagement

how do you tabulate tears
in actuarial tables

i have numbered the bones

ac-
count-
ability

measured in shoulder shrugs
& head shakes
while a woman
who cradled life
in the bowl…

Post by Palesa Mazamisa*

The heinous, brutal rape and subsequent slaughtering of Anene Booysen in South Africa’s Western Cape province has brought into the open, once again, the miry underbelly of our rainbow nation. At the heart of violence that Anene was subjected to, lies a bigger issue that South Africans wilfully shunt and ignore. This issue is our Achilles heel. It is what has our nation wondering at the gruesome nature of the violence committed against Anene with our mouths agape, spit dripping from our lips, trying to figure out what makes South Africa such a violent society.