It’s also true that, on the land we have lived on for thousands of years, we can wake up one day, to claims, by settlers, that, it, our land, was “empty land” all along.

Unfortunately, there are way too many Makhayas in our midst – broken souls that were created in the early days after the ‘demise’ of apartheid. Many of us are Nelson Mandela’s sacrificial lambs, who are barbecued daily in the name of reconciliation in South Africa.

A very young and determined migrant Ismail Dajee who landed up in South Africa around 1915, secured leasing space in Jeppe in 1931 at the time when non-whites could not own property and could only lease it due to the group areas act. Nevertheless, Mr Dajee tried breaking the continuity of a ‘whites only’ space and found a loop in a property in Jeppe, making it a shop and residence at the back.

The Ultimate Storytelling Contest is an open call for submissions, granting African Storytellers from across the continent to share their stories with not only the judges of the contest, but to integrate social media by posting a 3 minute video on their Facebook and Twitter timeliness with the hash tags, #UltimateStoryteller, #HSC and #HadithiyaAfrica.

It was with despair, to receive the dreadful news on Monday morning, 6th of July 2020 that South African Professor Ntongela Masilela, had transitioned to the ancestral realm. At the time of his death, it is noteworthy to read that the faculty directory of Pitzer College (an undergraduate liberal Arts and Sciences Institution), in the United States of America (USA) to date still depicts Masilela, as a Professor Emeritus of Creative Studies and World Literature, whose expertise namely included ‘Third World Literature’, ‘Commonwealth Literature’, ‘Central European Literature’, ‘African Literature’, ‘Latin American Literature’, ‘Literary Theory’, ‘Postmodernism’ and ‘Ancient Asian Literature’

I certainly benefited from the fact that I wasn’t really competing with 50% of the population. I literally was competing only with the white players. You talk about white privilege and it raises a lot of heat and debate on social media but it is the case. I’m very aware of that.

“We fight Rhodes because he means so much for oppression, injustice, & moral degradation to South Africa - but if he passed away tomorrow there still remains the terrible fact that something in our society has formed the matrix which has fed, nourished and built up such a man.”

As a former psychometrist at a large multinational public institution, I have an in-depth understanding of working with employees who operated in stressful environments across the world, from Cuba and Venezuela to Algeria and Mauritania. My interpretation is that the lockdown is not far from such environments of war and hardship.