In South Africa, the average post-rehabilitation life expectancy for someone who survives a traumatic spinal cord injury is 2 years. That means that, in this country, if you break your neck, and live with a severe disability as a result, chances are you will die within 2 years of your injury. The injury itself won’t… Read More What we owe each other, or a note to Premier Helen Zille
Some of my favourite stories contain an uncontested truth we hold about motherhood: Mothers are at their best when they are well and whole. Broken mothers, mothers whose pathologies loom large in their lives and, by extension, the lives of their families, are bad news. They lead to fractured adolescence (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants),… Read More Motherhood and Madness
As Day Zero – the day when the taps in Cape Town will run dry – approaches at certain speed, I find myself increasingly worried and confused. Worried for obvious reasons. Confused and confounded by the clamour and chaos of our collective responses to this crisis. Cape Town is hardly the first city in the… Read More Troubled Water
There’s a clip from an episode of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show, Master of None, that I like to use when I’m teaching. It depicts his character at a party with friends and co-workers. A random guy approaches one of the party, a black woman, and tries to buy her drink. She politely declines. Afterwards, while she’s walking… Read More Master of Some
When I was 8-years-old, I had a friend named Jade. Jade lived next door and was an only child to adoring, attentive parents. I was a year or so older than her and we went to different schools, but we bonded over our shared admiration for her impressive suite of Barbies. Her parents weren’t crazy… Read More Heavy Hangs the Head
I come from a long line of women who get shit done. My mother’s mother, Emma, was a force unto herself. After her husband became blind, she went to work as nurse, so that she could support him and her four girls. She learnt to drive, becoming the first woman in her small town to… Read More On leaning in to the moment
Motherhood is hard. Make no mistake; this is a truth universally acknowledged amongst mothers of all stripes. Regardless of the philosophies of motherhood to which you subscribe, or the mama-circles in which you move, no other mother will question the enormity of the task to which you have committed. As feminist author Jessica Valenti puts… Read More Crazy Like a Mother
Those who know me or my writing know that I battle with mental illness. As I politely but firmly see 2017 out the door, I am thinking about that battle. This year was a long and difficult one for many reasons, and it has left me bruised in new places, and broken open ancient scars.… Read More On brokenness
Marikana was an echo of where we have come from but Life Esidimeni is a sign of where we’re going. That should scare us all, but not enough of us are paying attention because disabled people were the victims.
If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. Arthur Quiller-Couch Ten years ago, I watched a documentary on the life of Nelson Mandela. Instead of… Read More Killing our darling: A meditation on Nelson Mandela’s Legacy
Rumbi Writes 
You must be logged in to post a comment.