Nonqaba said ...

The internet is a public park. It has no doors no keys: Photo credit: online pic. There is no theft online, except for hackers that crack a bank’s security system and siphon off money. Not only banks. In 2018, they hacked a British Airways data system and stole vital passenger information especially credit card numbers. Hackers are specialized thieves, but generally there is no break and enter online because we provide information on our own free will. The internet is a house with no doors, windows or special elevators. We don’t carry around a bunch of keys clipped to our belts like building maintenance guys. You’re wrong, you say. We have passwords to keep thieves out. Yes, passwords to enter the internet open house and drop off things we give out for free.   There is no theft online because we give away tweets, blogs, opinion, photographs, ideas, and other ‘content.’ Let’s admit it. There has been instances where we feel we have been robbed. It happens to all of us: a tweet that was

Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang.   “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “A farmer.” “A farmer? Your family doesn’t have land.” “A truck driver then. They are big and high.” “Is that the only reason?” “Trucks take food from the farm to the city, to the big supermarkets.” It is a parent’s worse nightmare. What kind of a son doesn’t want to be an actor, an NBA basketball player, a Premier League player, a country western singer, a rapper and other pursuits that guarantee instant wealth? It is priorities. They are all screwed up. A son that wants to be a farmer or a truck driver understands life’s relay. He’s more valuable than the one with a million followers because he takes off his clothes. In the pursuit for money and fame, we forget that life is quite simple: ability to grow food and share it with others. The son who wants to be a farmer, controls the source and the distribution. We never appreciated the connection until COVID-19 hit us in the butt. There was lockdown. Don’t move. Don

Photo credit: online pic. Whether you are Christian or not, you probably got gifts because you live in Europe or North America. This is difficult for families from other religions because they don’t want their kids to be left out in the cold when schoolmates say: What did you get for Christmas ? Billionaire kids probably got uncut diamonds because daddy owns diamond mines all over the world, in countries invaded by Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and are now called ‘poor.’ Christmas gifts we got, call for introspection. Do they contribute to climate change? They are gifts we don’t need, gifts that create an illusion of a better life. Gifts such as these. n  Gifts that need insurance. n  Gifts that require bodyguards. n  Gifts that force whales to run away from home to die on beaches. n  Gifts that gorge the earth. Uncut diamonds maul the earth, removing the glue that binds it. This has rendered the earth useless and we hear horror stories of houses being swallowed

Are you writing a novel with a unique plot or recycling tired stories? The novel you’ll write in 2022  is the novel you’ve never seen, a novel you’ve dreamed about. It’s the novel that does not look like a Bollywood movie, a Hollywood movie or a Nollywood movie. It will be a novel without murder and FBI agents. It’s a novel that will make your readers smile, sigh and swear because they recognize a thought, a feeling, a place and certain people. You’ve come across such books in your reading life but they are not more than ten fingers. The novel you’ll publish in 2022 also has things and places you’ve never imagined. I was fortunate to come across such a book. I bought it in 2020, a painful and historic year for humanity. The COVID-19 pandemic. Courier companies made profits as wide as sand on a secluded beach. Why? Because we were on lockdown and we bought things such as books and breakfast, from the internet. The book in question has a married couple. The man works for a courier compan

Canadian Cancer Society volunteers in Winnipeg. They live in their own homes. They can still drive. They can cook basic meals. Their bank accounts are in the green. Their sight is 80%. They have laptops. They are not happy. They are retired. They have bouts of depression because they wake up to nothing, no destination for the day, no knowledge to contribute to life's DNA. But they do. They have all that experience that can put Google out of business. Solution? Have a weekly blog about what you know best. You used to be an authority in the business. You flew all over the world as a guest speaker, or you used to cover the crime or business beat in the local newspaper. Blog about it. I can’t. Yes you can. Do you know that some bloggers with parenting blogs don’t have kids, not even half kids? Do you know that some bloggers hire somebody to write the blogs? You are ahead because you will write about something close to your heart, something you’ve been doing for plus years. Other blogg

Chizzy Alichi Nigerian actress holds a glass of palm wine  on her traditional wedding to Chike Ugochukwu.   Before Hollywood and its romantic dinners and engagement rings, magazines featuring the rich and famous, Nigerian movies, South African soap operas and Instagram, Africa had traditional wedding customs. Step #1. There’s the introduction. Man and his father or uncles go to woman’s place with a keg of palm wine to state their intention. In recent times, it has been replaced by drinks from Scotland. Her father calls her. Do you know these people? Step #2. Once she says yes, her parents prepare a list of things required by tradition. By tradition, we mean items symbolic of marriage. In the olden days,everything came from their land, the palm wine, yams, goats etc. The man’s family accepts the list and starts collecting them. A SHORT PLAY Obina has Baba Obina and Mama Obina worried. He shows no interest in getting married. Obina loves his parents and doesn’t want them to have heart tr

  "Great computer speakers.” “Thanks. I got them for Christmas.” Technology has its pros and cons. Kids are experts on the subject. Ask your teen daughter. She has only ‘cool’ things to say about technology. Technology has always been there, and the proof is in your basement. Go down there and have a good laugh. We are more conscious of it now, because of the accelerated speed. New product today, it’s outdated after a year.   No problem. We’ll throw out yesterday’s headphones for digital ones. Recycle them? Not on your life. But product development is not the only culprit responsible for climate change.  It is tech mistakes. Example. Your first home desk had skyscrapers like hard drives. Let’s not forget the printer. Today it has one tenant, the laptop. However, it is another good example of things that contribute to climate change. Once upon a time, we said goodbye to the keyboard because tech companies decided to embed it inside the machine. They also got rid of the mouse. It co

January 6 insurrection. Richard Barnett sits on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's chair.  Photo credit: online pic. Prisoners look forward to going home but dread inevitable unemployment, because most places do not hire people with a criminal record. Storming the Capitol Building on 6 January 2020. That rule should also apply to Trump supporters found guilty of attempting to overthrow the American government on that day causing loss of lives, damage to property and bringing America into disrepute. Whatever political stripes on your shoulder, 6 January was use of force on a building which is for all intents and purposes, a 'person' in its own right. Not only that, the intention was to do grievous bodily harm to people inside and take over the government illegally. It is a crime. Therefore if found guilty, the 6 January perpetrators should do time.  When they are released from prison, they must not get jobs in all levels of government, because they tried to overthrow it. Corporate Ameri

Bell Hooks 25 September 1952 - 15 December 2021. Online pic. Bell Hooks has passed on. She lived for thoughts and wrote them in many books for you and I, because our brain is like that wedding dress in the box. We don’t use it. What does passed on mean? It’s one of the announcements that fascinated me as a student in the U.S. It is very stressful, but some African Americans have two strands of English, one for work and the outside world in general, and a different one for home. I found the home one fascinating because it reminded me of where I was born, somewhere south, in a continent called Africa. Parents taught us not to say someone is dead, because they are not dogs, that sleep outside the house and die outside. Human beings pass on to the next world to meet grandparents and other relatives who now live there. They are called ancestors. That’s why we drop some beer, whisky or wine on the ground first, before we drink. Ancestors are still with us and they are also thirsty. Passed on

Photo Credit: Essence magazine. Entertainment media is one reason why Nate Moore, the Marvel producer and Ryan Coogler, director of Black Panther decided not to have another T’Challa to replace Chadwick Boseman, who died 28 August 2020. If they do replace him, entertainment media and podcasts will flog the new T'Challa with one question: Do you think you play a better Black Panther than Chadwick Boseman?   Very insensitive. Good thing Marvel won’t replace him. He’s irreplaceable. We don’t know what will be in Black Panther 2 when it is released in November 2022, but there is one good reason   why Chadwick Boseman should not be recast, as they say in the business. In the original 2018 movie, casting was impeccable. Atandwa Kani, the South African actor who played the young Black Panther looks exactly like Chadwick Boseman. If Boseman is replaced, will they get an actor who looks like him or someone completely different? My favourite line in the movie is: ‘I don’t freeze ,” said T’Ch

Photo Credit: online pic. Apprenticeship. Short stories used to be an apprenticeship for fiction. Bricklayers, welders, plumbers, masons, carpenters and other trades start off as apprentices, working under skilled craftsmen.      Can you write? Writers used to test the waters with short stories. Some went all the way to the apex and wrote novels. Other stories were published in anthologies. Why are you using the past tense? I’m saying used to, because magazines, the workshop that allowed writers to show case their short stories are gone. I mean printed magazines. Magazines are not dead as such. They are now in digital form. Fingers are still the same tools for reading, but we no longer use them to page pages, if I can put it that way. We scroll or click on computers and phones. Before we post an obituary, we must remember that short stories are a thought that plays out in two, three or four typed pages. The story ends at the end of the thought. Short stories are short bus rides that en

You see tape, he sees a road. Photo credit, Alpha Mom. Where there are human beings, there’s knowledge. Otherwise, they will perish if they don’t know how to avoid devious crocodiles when crossing rivers, berries fit for consumption, hunt rabbits, embalm food for the winter, build houses and canoes from trees and ensure women give birth safely. The whole educational system is guilty of equating knowledge with books, questionable knowledge because it is based on views of a group of men and women, with a hidden agenda. At university, we were forced to buy books written by our lecturers, so it was written knowledge for profit. The danger with book knowledge is that it dates easily. Television is a case in point. It overtook books. We became so glued to the small screen, even kids had T.V. sets in their rooms. That is stale news. The internet is the new knowledge. Twitter has the monopoly of ‘breaking news.’ It’s ironic, but the internet might jolt us into reality, force us to revisit know

Covid-19 doesn't like human contact so no biz for Santa. The pandemic is a wake-up call, that we cannot take anything for granted especially jobs.  Business is about numbers. It goes down the drain when numbers dwindle and that is what social distancing and other Covid-19 precautions do, wash down numbers. What is the situation at work? Will you be laid off? If the boss doesn’t like you, you might be on the retrenchment list. I hope you’re not, but if you do, what is Plan B? Have you thought of starting you own business? Your Skills You don’t have an updated C.V. or resume because you’ve been in your last job for 10 years. Update it, but call it a Business Profile, because you gained a lot of experience and contacts during those years. Your business profile. We under-value ourselves. We don’t realize that what we know is packaged into words like marketing, tech support, finance, customer relations, design or security. For example in Canada, people from a certain country are well-es

Coronation Street, famous British working class TV sitcom. “Grampa did you keep the envelopes?” “What envelopes?” “Brown envelopes you got on pay day.” Some old movies have scenes where the foreman gives laborers brown envelopes with their weekly wages. This happened on construction sites and factories where machinists ran the marathon with their feet, churning out clothes, bags, sheets or anything that needs stitches.   You cannot image the brown envelope deposit because your salary zooms straight into your cheque account every two weeks, but is is a historical fact. Depending on where you are in the world, people used to get paid with real cash in little brown envelopes. They also stood in line, waiting for their turn to collect it. It might look funny now but life depended on those brown envelopes. Families could for one day have meat or fish, instead of the usual cabbage or potatoes. There was money to repair kids’ shoes. Mothers could afford to buy yarn to make mittens and sweater

Taye Diggs plays a famous South African journalist in the 2004 movie Drum.  Film is directed by Zola Maseko.  What is the media? The question is directed at Columbia School of Journalism in New York, where I was told the media is subjective. Such schools teach the same thing all over the world. If I could be a speck of dust in a college lecture hall, I would listen to what retired journalists teach students, about the craft of news gathering and dissemination. No. I don’t think Journalism modules include Twitter. Students have that in their phones. What is the media? Reporters who work for established media houses want an answer because they are maligned, wrongly accused of every photographic, digital and printed misdemeanour. They correctly point out that tools of the trade such as microphones, cameras and  typewriters are no longer exclusively theirs. Therefore, they cannot be blamed for every online opinion. The cellphone is the current DW, CBC, BBC, SABC, DW, Agence France Presse o

Bollywood actors, Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal wedding. Photo credit: Katrina and Vicky.  The internet is free. We have such a sense of entitlement to online blogs, court proceedings, academic opinion, videos, photos, podcasts, Tik Tok etc., that we don’t like it when bride and groom say, no cellphones at their wedding. They chose the cake or the red bridal finery common in Asia. They also have a right to tell invited guests how to behave on their special day. It’s only one day. They won’t marry twenty times. They are not Elizabeth Taylor, the actress. Wedding guests are a select few, usually friends, family and work colleagues. Unfortunately, cellphones turn that love and trust into betrayal, where the married couple see their photos sprayed online. Trust is gone. That’s why Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) are now the norm in high profile weddings. Dear guest, don’t take any photos. Photography has always been an integral part of weddings, even in cultures where the bride’s face i

Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang. YouTube had insomnia, about an upstart app that was becoming too big for its boots. Upstart? Yes, upstart. Tik Tok is the name. Initially, YouTube dismissed Tik Tok as the funnies, something to make you laugh. Not anymore. It is taking Tik Tok seriously. That’s why it is aggressively advertising its latest baby: YouTube Shorts. Of course, YouTube will not openly admit it has a serious competitor. After all Tik Tok is just an app, while YouTube is the garden of Eden for moving images called video. Competition for YouTube? Yes, if competition can be defined as drinking from the same  pond. In this case, the youth is the pond. For a long time, YouTube had the monopoly of young people. They not only watch movies and other pre-packaged content, they create their own videos as well. YouTube calls them creators. They are producers and directors of their own comedy series, movies, ‘reality’ shows, etc. Do your kids or grand kids have a YouTube channel? Ask them. ‘No

Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang. Nature is the best anti-racism tool because it stands on two pillars: male and female, different body parts but human beings nonetheless. Night and day also represents different but equal, which enable things to grow during the day and also at night when we are asleep. Nature blesses us with food, pumpkins for example. They are an effective anti-racism tool, because from the same patch of land, comes a medley of colors and shapes. Kids see them in farmers’ markets, or even supermarkets if you don’t have access to farmers’ markets. Fall is behind us but we have photos of green, orange, yellow, small, big, perfect circles, undecided circles, cone shaped and sausage pumpkins in our phones. Halloween pumpkins are all cut up into eyes and mouths but not all of them are identical. Kids in a class won’t like the same shape or color but they will agree these vegetables are all pumpkins. Such diversity is found in their classroom, drugstore, on the bus or train and on

Ethan Crumbley shot dead 4 students at Oxford High School, Detroit Michigan. Photo Credit: online pic. The need to write something or post videos online is so urgent, it clouds tomorrow. What matters is today, being hailed a hero and indeed, the flag bearer for a cause, which could be digital, religious or right wing. Tomorrow comes when what you sent to the internet with great bravado, becomes evidence in a court of law. Ethan Crumbley 15 years old, is the latest example. On November 30 , he gunned down 4 students at Oxford High School in Detroit Michigan with a gun his father bought for him. His mother, Jennifer Crumbley showed him how to use it. How do we know all this? The prosecution got it from social media. Ethan Crumbley posted the gun on Instagram: ‘Just got my new beauty today. SIG SAUER 9mm. Any questions I will answer.’ His mother proudly told the internet how she was dispatching her maternal duties: ‘Mom and son day testing his new Christmas present.’  She taught him so we

Santa Claus is part of Christmas marketing. Christmas is a Christian holiday as the name implies, but Santa has no religious ties at all. It is about buying gifts, kids whispered to a man in a white beard, big stomach and a red suit. Parents have no option but to get them because Santa has willed it. Before the pandemic, this whispering used to take place on Santa’s lap. Not anymore. Covid-19 has put a stop to it. The virus discourages human contact. No kissing, no shaking hands, don’t stay so close to me (a song I think), six feet apart at the grocery store and definitely, no sitting on Santa’s lap. Should shopping malls remove Santa from the advertising strategy because of Covid-19 restrictions? After all parents don’t want him to infect the little darlings. Remember, these very kids cannot visit their grandmother at the old age home, because she is regarded as a Covid-19 high risk. No, the local shopping mall decided to go ahead with the Santa booth with all its red trimmings, but n

Publishers will be outraged, but fiction must be banned. Why? It doesn’t exist. It is a real life narrative with a lot of make-up: skin colour friendly foundation, a blush here mascara there, eye brow redesign, eye shadow and of course the book cover. Lipstick. Fiction doesn’t exist because publishers are kind enough to tell us that the author was a reporter in Afghanistan or Soviet Union. They figure this will convince readers, they are buying an authentic book, real fiction based on real life. Does it make sense? Fiction doesn’t exist because when authors are tired of their own countries, they suggest book plots set abroad. Publishers relish the idea of books set in ‘exotic’ places. Authors then jet off to do background research in countries where the sun is a given and waves on the shore deliver frightening secrets. Truth is stranger than fiction. Now, is that a proverb or a Hollywood line? It’s a pertinent question because movies are so powerful, they determine culture, like the li