Thought Leader showcases the best in opinion and insight from around the continent. To support the Mail & Guardian, subscribe here.

One clue to understanding the difference between modernism, postmodernism and poststructuralism lies in the ancient “quarrel” between Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides argued that only being is, ...

South Africa is renowned for its revisionism, and numbing down days of historical significance into occasions that resemble festivity, rather than their revolutionary origin and essence. African ...

Within the feminist movement, African feminism occupies a unique position that challenges disempowering constructs issuing from both Western and African paradigms. Contrary to the disinformation about ...

In a previous article in the Mail & Guardian, I wrote about problems in the postdoctoral fellow system in South African universities. The nub of this critique was that universities, the department of ...

A minority ANC government in the Western Cape and an ideologically compromised court system should think long and hard before it demonstrates that mob rule has ...

The demographic dividend — “the accelerated economic growth that may result from a decline in a country’s birth and death rates and the subsequent change in the age structure of the population” and ...

Something’s a brewing, and something’s a bubbling in the flavour pot of world music and it comes from an unlikely source: South Korea. The K-pop/K-culture fare has spilled over into South Africa and ...

Having worked my way through the DG Murray Trust’s latest issue of its annual publication, Human Factor: Young People Open Minds, I decided to apply my open mind to the difficult topic the issue took ...

Covid-19 and its socioeconomic consequences has emphasised people’s need for these places: research, biodiversity conservation, plants for food, health and cultural purposes, and open space in ...

Gattaca, the 1997 dystopian science fiction film by Andrew Niccol, was prescient. It anticipated the inauguration of a newly class-stratified society based on genetics, the manipulation of genes to ...

I’m absolutely amazed at Mosiuoa Lekota’s recent condemnation of a lack of democracy in the ruling African National Congress, as one of the major reasons for his leading role in the formation of the ...