When it came down to it, it was a Grace Mugabe-shaped straw that broke the overburdened camel’s back. I still can’t get over it. Don’t get me wrong, I know that our former first lady, the fabled Amai, is terrible. But is she the most terrible of all the collective indignities we’ve endured? Is her 3-month PhD,… Read More Disgrace
About a year ago, a video on womanhood was doing the rounds on social media. It features a series of older women talking about what they feel younger women should and could do differently in today’s fast-paced world. The video was produced by a spa called Sanctuary, as part of their campaign to convince women… Read More All I Want for Mother’s Day
Whilst I was watching a particularly harrowing sequence in the new HBO-produced movie The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (based on Rebecca Skloot’s bestselling book), I was reminded of a bit that Chris Rock used to include in his stand-up about race. He would argue that the most ‘racist’ black people he knew were older black people,… Read More The Immortal Lessons of Henrietta Lacks
In anticipation of the forthcoming Hulu dramatization, I reread Margaret Atwood’s iconic dystopian, feminist text, The Handmaid’s Tale. Well, only sort of. I have a lot less time and a lot more toddler in my life than I did when I first read the book twelve years ago. This time, I listened to the unabridged audiobook.… Read More Nolite te bastardes carborondurum: A Maternal Reading of The Handmaid’s Tale
The first year of motherhood. May I be so presumptuous as to write about it from within, before I have fully emerged, one-year-old and smashed (sugar and gluten free) birthday cake in each hand? I. The pulsating loneliness of it. I don’t quite know how to explain it. You won’t be alone, ever. If you’re… Read More No hood like this mamahood
In the end, we – or I – caved. My son was measuring big, huge, large, especially his head. There was no way I was even going to try to push him out. Yes, I carry that shame. And I still feel the need to justify it. But his head was huge, look at him,… Read More A Birth Story
“For the first time in my life, I understand the concept of home: it is not a refuge, not necessarily a snuggly place of warmth and cheery domesticity, not some essential rightness like the satisfying click that releases a lock, but rather a sense of peace with contradiction. It is a giving in, an acceptance,… Read More Birth Pains
Another year, another viral story about Cape Town’s insidious racism. This time the story came from a young woman who was visiting the city with her family over the festive season. At some point, she and her family tried to make reservations at an upmarket Camps Bay restaurant, using (as you do) their own… Read More But is it racism?
look at what the lord has made. above Missouri, sweet smoke. not an elegy for Mike Brown, Danez Zmith Oh, the week that was. On Monday morning, I woke up to the news that a grand jury in Missouri, in the US, had decided not to indict the white policeman who killed an unarmed,… Read More On Silence and Human Limits
By Rumbi A feminist shit-storm of epic proportions (is there any other kind?) ensued two weeks ago when Lily Allen released her clever, satirical video for her track Hard out Here. The video features, amongst other things, a medley of women, many black, dancing in the fashion we’ve become accustomed to in this age of… Read More The Fear
Rumbi Writes 
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