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Driving lessons, turning the wheel is scary for learners. Isi-Zulu is a language spoken in South Africa. This blog also features Zulu lessons. Turn is jika in Zulu. It is used for a U-turn when driving, or turn because you’ve changed your mind about your destination. Turn is when friends disappoint you or plain betrayal. Your wonderful neighbour might suddenly turn against you. The boss too, when a jealous co-worker brings her coffee sprinkled with lies about you. Turn, is also about elections, when a constituency that has voted red for a long time turns green. Georgia State voted Democrat in 2020 adding critical votes for Joe Biden. A lazy person is called uma-jika-nelanga  (one who turns with the sun). Ji-ka . You say the first part like jingle bells and second like Kazeem. ZULU ENGLISH Jika la. Turn here. Musa uku-jika la. Don’t turn here. Jika kancane kukhona izingane. Turn slowly, there are kids around. Jika i steering wheel, kanje. Turn the steering wheel like this. Khombisa ukut

Women don't value like gold and platinum.  March, International Women’s Month is coming to a close, reminding us once again that mothers will never make it to the Stock Exchange. Although they are the only precious commodity, they don’t have premium value like gold and platinum. They’re a once-off commodity,  when their body functions as a garden to nurture the human form for nine months, then deliver it to the world through sweat and blood, literally. Women give the human form milk, warmth and love until it becomes a man and gets a job at the Stock Exchange. The more it grows, the more the mother’s value deteriorates, a sharp contrast to gold and platinum, which go up in value all the time. The human form in the woman’s belly must have value. It must be a boy, so that it can be an ‘heir’ and inherit daddy’s gold and platinum investments. In some countries, women are burnt alive for giving birth to valueless forms, girls. In places like Africa, tradition gives men the right to marr

What is the connection between climate change and coffee table books? They have been replaced by silver balls on a tray. So? We don’t have the capacity to think for ourselves so, at some stage, decorators and other people who tell us what is in vogue for our homes, will get rid of these round objects by throwing them in the thrash can. How will garbage collectors burn them? We don’t care. It’s just garbage. Actually, the climate change concern started before the silver balls landed on that tray on the coffee table. Factories manufactured them. Special machines were made to mould them before sending them to other machines to colour them. Waste from these factories contributed to air pollution. That’s why we are wearing masks. The silver balls are not necessary at all. They add no value. They’re just a badge of wealth made possible by the ‘buy now pay later tool’: credit cards. COFFEE TABLE BOOKS The silver balls made books we used to put on coffee tables obsolete. They were predominantl

Online pic. Masks are a wake-up call that clean air is a scarce commodity.  It is polluted because of things like the coffee grinder. I chose this luxury item because i ran out of coffee recently. No problem, I bought coffee beans and asked the coffee store to grind it for me. Climate change is partly caused by things we don’t need like coffee grinders. But we need them!  No, we don’t because coffee culture made them obsolete. Before COVID-19, the coffee shop was the new boardroom, dating palace and family room. You have a coffee grinder but you don’t know where you put it because you haven’t used it for five years. You either bought it or got it as a gift. We won’t talk about coffee makers that haven’t been used since the diet tribe discovered kale. Our kitchen counter tops represent the reason why the air is polluted and whales run away from the sea, to die on the beach. Coffee grinders, waffle makers, dough-mixers, old slow cookers, vegetable choppers, can openers, electric carving

Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang Immigrants going to Canada, U.S., U.K., European Union, Australia and New Zealand need pre-boarding counselling, before collecting visas from embassies.   Why? Coupled with not finding a job and failure to adapt to the norms of a new country might result in stress so severe, they might might end up on the streets, walking aimlessly talking to themselves. Who will provide the counselling? Men and women who have lived in these countries can help informally, or through Non-Profit Organizations (NGO’s). Embassies always provide printed reading material which they also post online, but it’s not enough because it paints a rosy picture of, let’s say Canada. No country mentions it’s bad side in an immigration booklet or website. Immigrants are not monolithic. They were rich, middle class, working class, no class or royalty in their own countries. Whatever the social and economic differences, they must understand that life will be different in the new country. 1.  They

Amanzimtoti, South Africa. Online pic. How many photos do you have in your phone? Probably 5,000 because you don’t drop them in a SUMMER PHOTOS file in your computer, then delete. Just kidding! What has been deleted though is asking strangers to take your picture on a beach in Amanzimtoti, KZN, a mountain top in Lesotho, Africa or Niagara Falls Canada. Selfies do all that now, even suicidal selfies, which were meant to be ‘cool.’ Most strangers loved helping tourists with taking pictures. Maybe they liked the idea that their bridge, cathedral or Great Wall of China will be seen all over the world. Tourists then posed and locals happily pressed CLICK. Tourists would fly back home and send the film to the lab to be developed. That was a side of humanity we took for granted. Human beings don’t like each other in general. There’s very little love between friends, family, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, thieves and followers. But that humanity enabled strangers to give other strangers th

Wapta Falls, British Columbia Customer service inefficiency at some businesses sends us packing to websites and corporate chat rooms, at least they don’t have recorded messages. You dial the number, and here they come. n  If you want to go to Vancouver, B.C. press I. n  If you want to go to Hawaii, press 2. n  If you want to go to Iguazu Falls in  Argentina and Brazil,  press 3. n  If you want to go to Manitoba Canada get off the phone. People who work at the Customer Service pool have their own stories to tell. They feel it’s one-sided to call them the bad guys. The things they go through are so bad, Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood and even Netflix, will not touch them with a barge pole. Caller: Yesterday, I was trying to call my sister when the phone …… Customer Service: Maam, what’s your account number? Caller: I got the bloody bill today. When did I make these calls? Customer Service: Sir, what’s your account number? Caller: This is a rip-off, you said this tablet ………. Customer Ser

Pandemic cracked the river. COVID-19 Throw Back March 2020. Something is in the air. It’s called COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) says it’s a pandemic, which means it knows no race, gender, culture and country. WHO recommends ways of containing it. Governments decide to lockdown. The World Health Organization had a communication strategy. It had to, bearing in mind the magnitude of the problem. The first item on the strategy was to put the blame on China, a reason used for all previous plagues in Europe. Dust those history books and read, if your local library is open. Europe made citizens comfortable by saying all sickness came from China and Africa. The second item on the communication strategy was solidarity. COVID-19 was one enemy, we are in this together. There was no mention of variants. They find variants and they drop the block of ice, resulting in colour cracks. We now have ‘pure’ countries that don’t have any variants and tainted countries. COVID-19 Variants We w

  What is news? What is opinion? Blended. How newspapers, television and online platforms gather and deliver news changed the product. It blended news and opinion, making what we were taught in journalism school, obsolete. Be subjective. That was the creed. Report what happened. Don’t put your spin on it. The notion of being subjective in journalism should be retired because Good Morning Britain, Good Morning America, Good Morning European Union, Oprah, Fox News, The Daily Show, The View etc. are platforms that take a stand on any given issue. It’s perceived as the right thing to do. In fact, it might be wrong to say ‘news’ and ‘opinion’ have blended because opinion has eclipsed what is news. Piers Morgan walks out of Good Morning Britain because of  Alex Beresford’s take on how Morgan feels about Meghan Markle. I re-tweet that. That is no longer news. My retweet is opinion, not breaking news. I had the option of not re-tweeting it, but I did to demonstrate how I feel about it. There’s

Before Covid-19 Pic by Nonqaba waka Msimang The Liberal Party needs new skates because there’s a new kid on the ice, the Green Party  of Canada, led by Annamie Paul. Old skates, like your old morning slippers are comfortable, familiar, so is voting. That’s why the Conservative Party and Liberal Party have an ongoing table tennis situation in governing Canada. Voters voted for the Big Two because of family voting patterns from parents and grandparents and economic status. There’s also the immigration factor. Immigrants joined families in Canada who steered them to one of the political parties. Winds of change forced Conservatives and Liberals to work harder to stay on the ice, when organized labor became so well-organized, it formed the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961 led by Tommy Douglas. It has ruled some provinces in the past but has never put a Prime Minister in Ottawa. The way things are in the year 2021, is that the Green Party is the new foe of the Big Three but the Liberal Pa

  Mitt Romney U.S. Senator. 2024 U.S. presidential election. Finding duty-free voters will be Mitt Romney’s biggest challenge, should he decide to run in 2024.  He ran in 2012 but lost to the 44 th  U.S. President Barack Obama. Duty-free? Yes, voters who are not duty bound to the president who lost the election in 2020. It will be an uphill battle because the seeds Trump planted found warm soil for some Republicans as we witnessed the 6 January desecration of Congress. Like all parties, the GOP is a garden center with a variety of seedlings. It will be hard for Romney to find duty-free Republicans because the previous president seems to have a grip on all kinds of seedlings, working class and senate billionaires who don’t rely on him financially. What will make Romney’s weeding difficult is that duty-free party faithfuls keep a low profile. They donate housekeeping money but are not vocal. Some are afraid because they know the political consequences of stating the obvious: Trump lost t