SLICE : Joining the 5am club

by | Apr 30, 2019 | Opinion

With winter slowly but surely creeping up on us in Johannesburg, I find myself rather reluctant to get out of bed and start my day. This has often led to my morning routine being crammed into just fifteen minutes of hastily getting dressed and running out the front door five minutes late. As a result, I would arrive at my morning commitments feeling grimy and unprepared.

This led me to question whether or not my slack morning attitude was foreshadowing the rest of my day.  The author Johnnie Dent Junior once said, “Early is a priceless timepiece owned by the successful.” This notion has been echoed by various other successful people, which is why I have decided to join the 5am club this winter. I have been a member of this very prestigious club for three weeks now and so far, I am loving it. In fact, while I am writing this, I am watching the sun rise and nibbling on a piece of chocolate.

What a great way to start the day!

When I first adjusted my sleep routine, I really struggled to fall asleep at night. The truth is that, in order to get up two hours earlier, I had to get used to going to bed much earlier than before. On a brighter note, it took just three days of perseverance (and a lack of sleep) before I was able to drift into a peaceful slumber as soon as my head hit the pillow at 8:30pm.

I have been sleeping like a baby every night since and usually wake up feeling energised and motivated in the morning.

I did a lot of research before undertaking this challenge and one of the questions that came up was why I should wake up two hours earlier than necessary. The truthful answer is that the first few hours of each day usually sets the tone for the rest of the day. Each individual has a choice between waking up just in time to get ready and leave, or take two hours each morning to choose how they wish to start the day. When opting for the first alternative, one is essentially giving external factors, such as traffic and bad hair days, the power to determine the tone of one’s entire day.  In my opinion, waking up earlier is the way to go!

My current morning routine consists of me waking up at 4:45am and then hitting the snooze button on my alarm until those last fifteen precious minutes are up. Once I’m awake I like to have a sip of water and catch up on any admin. This way I get to enjoy the warmth of my bed for just a little longer, while also being able to organise my day without the distraction of people immediately replying to my emails and messages. Once I have completed these tasks, I usually take a brisk 3km walk on the treadmill at home before heading to a yoga class or completing my gym workout for the day. This leaves me feeling accomplished before the day has even started. Once my exercise routine has been completed, I take some time to get dressed and prepare myself for whatever the day has in store for me.

Since adopting this morning routine, my life has felt more manageable and organised. I no longer feel like I am constantly being bombarded with tasks and demands because each morning I am able to deal with these under peaceful circumstances and with a fresh mind. This may not be the solution for everybody, but if you are up to the challenge, I would highly recommend at least giving it a try. Joining the 5am club has changed my life and I do not intend on terminating my membership anytime soon.

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SLICE: The business of monetising black outrage

by | Apr 24, 2019 | Opinion

Advertising has come a long way since jingles about cereal and housewives wrestling with Verimark vacuum cleaners. The standard, cookie-cutter formula of selling brands, perception or products with the ubiquity of white picket fences and nuclear families with pearly-toothed smiles gushing over washing powder just doesn’t quite cut it.

With limited airtime and competition over space, advertising doesn’t manipulate the unattainable anymore, it weaponises black rage to cause a stir.

Take the now infamous 2017 Dove advert: the Unilever giant distributed an advert of a black woman seemingly transformed as her cleaner, whiter self after using a Dove body-wash.

The racist undertones of the advert became a source of outrage and debate on social media. The recycled PR apology from the brand made its rounds and Dove still remains as prevalent as ever with the backlash barely making a dent in sales.

Another beauty brand, Nivea, was found guilty of the same pattern of symbolising whiteness as the aspiration through their Natural Fairness lotion advert in 2017.

In 2018, H&M made the only black child in their catalogue wear a ‘coolest monkey in the jungle’ sweater, alluding to the racist tropes of othering black people as wild animals.

Gucci’s recent 2019 advert featuring a white woman wearing a Jim Crow-type black jumper with exaggerated red lips seen in the blackface minstrel performances of the 1950s also utilised black outrage to stay relevant.

Each of these brands have released content perpetuating colourism, racism and a strong undercurrent of anti-blackness in a social climate that makes it difficult to believe the intention was anything but deliberate.

Brands feed on the black response to racist representations and with each validly outraged Tweet comes an increase in their chances of staying in the 24-hour news cycle without bearing the brunt of any real lasting ramifications.

Technology enables us to have conversations across borders instead of a one-dimensional, one-stream flow of information with zero participation at the end. Decades ago, adverts were simply funnelled down your throat with little to no input, critique or comment on how they were received other than if the product sold or not.

Decades ago, people of colour were subjected to racist misrepresentation in the media, depicted as voiceless, identity-less tropes without much say in how we wanted to see ourselves.

Now, we have platforms to shut down the careless narratives people who don’t look like us construct but that we need to realise that the freedom of expression has become a weapon in the arsenal of conglomerates.

Retweets, shares and likes are the currency of the digitised world. If your ideas aren’t going viral, they’re lost in a virtual sea of over-saturated content. Advertisers know this better than most.

The pattern in modern age advertising is to bet on riding the clout of trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.

As the old adage goes, “bad publicity is still publicity” and advertising seems to manipulate valid outrage at being marginalised as a way to stay in the limelight.

The problem with exploiting black rage for profit is that, even after centuries of colonialism and oppression, our rage isn’t an infinite resource. Monetising black rage is essentially free advertising but what it costs to the psyche of black people is a lot more.

There are tangible consequences to this: black rage has been a tool for our survival in a world that expects silence or submission from the historically and perpetually oppressed. Exhausting black rage by having to constantly fight for your humanity every time H&M wants their name in headlines is causing distraction and fatigue from what we should be really focused on.

Black rage is critically important, it is valid and it is the very thing that ensured the liberation of this country and the emancipated black identity from the constraints and skewed narratives of white hegemony.

The burden shouldn’t be on the marginalised to have to expend our rage to make neoliberal corporations recognise our humanity apart from what we spend or don’t spend. Black people don’t have to expend emotional labour doing free sensitivity training for brands that should know better.

Maybe originality is dead (and there is absolutely nothing about original about racism), but it’s time for a new stage of advertising where humanity is worth a bit more than a click-through rate. 

FEATURED IMAGE: Busang Senne, student journalist at Wits Vuvuzela. Photo: File. 

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SLICE: Finding more than I bargained for in journalism

by | Feb 14, 2019 | Opinion

The world of journalism is awash with endless possibilities, and after entering it with the aim of ending up in broadcast journalism – a year’s worth of training has unveiled many other interests I never imagined I had.

Looking back to my high school days, I had often watched e-News and fell deeply in love with broadcast journalism after seeing anchor Nikiwe Bikitsha doing a live crossing during the funeral of the late great Nelson Mandela and testing prominent South Africans with tough questions.

As I took in her work on a daily basis, I admired the way she articulated herself, put corrupt officials in the hot seat by asking them tough questions live on air and how she moved effortlessly between television and radio.

Bikitsha certainly inspired me to pursue journalism with the hopes of one day being a senior news anchor on one of the world’s respected news channels. And so, with this in mind, I started my honours in journalism and media studies degree at Wits University in 2018.

After getting admitted to the journalism honours programme, I chose to major in television/videography with the aim of learning how to speak with confidence and poise in front of the camera before I finished my degree.

Little did I know that I would end up learning how to operate a camera, to be the one interviewing people from behind the camera and editing the footage into an entire news or lifestyle package.

I have basically learned how to produce videos that have more than just talking heads, but include sequences, cutaways and whatever else is needed to make a great video even fit for television. This was certainly way more than I had bargained for and I fell in love with the craft more and more as the year progressed.

The scope of experience I gained in the Wits journalism department proved that videography was not the only aspect of the course that became my ‘thing’. Investigating and writing ‘spicy’ stories, as my peers would call them, became one of my favourite things to do as a young journalist.

The excitement that came with hearing the rumours about a certain professor being dismissed from the university for nondisclosure of a relationship with his student was exciting enough, but it didn’t match the thrill of digging deeper,proving the story was actually true, and getting to interview all the people involved.

Beyond those spicy stories though, I also admired feature writing from a distance. After having to work on a feature article for the 2018 in depth project, I learned how difficult it is to find the right words to describe one’s surroundings in the form of showing instead of telling. Although I have not perfected the art of feature writing as yet, I certainly know a thing or two about such articles, all thanks to my mentors.

Now that I am a qualified journalist, I have come to appreciate the multifaceted field of journalism and certainly look forward to using each and every one of my skills to expand my horizons as opposed to only heading to the one thing that brought me to Wits Journalism, broadcast journalism.

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SLICE OF LIFE: Whose body is it anyway?

by | Aug 4, 2018 | Opinion

I recently discovered a Facebook group called “I regret having children”. It’s a group where parents anonymously post about how they regret their (often unplanned) pregnancies and how much children have ruined their life. I had left the group absolutely certain that, at least for the next 10 years, I do not want to have children and began considering long term birth control like the Intrauterine Device (IUD). Yet, when I explained this, I was met with, “but how can you know? What if you meet someone in the next few years and they want kids?”

At the time I dismissed it, along with all the laughs I received from older people when I explained my stance. They gave me knowing winks, as if saying, “sure honey, wait a few years and then get back to me”, before asking what my hypothetical future husband would think. I then slowly began to realise how universal the attitude is.

The first realisation came when a family member described to me how she had gone to a government clinic for an IUD. She arrived only to be asked by a nurse what her future husband would think and got pressured into getting a Depo Provera injection because, according to the nurse, giving her an IUD would be a waste of government money as she would just come back to take it out in two to three years after she’d met a suitable husband.

The second came when in America, reproductive rights, which had seemed like a settled debate after Roe v Wade (1973), were thrust back into public discourse due to policy and legislative changes which threatens to roll back funding for clinics like Planned Parenthood. This has created a ripple effect felt by women in developing countries, where Donald Trump’s Global Gag Rule has led to non-profit organisations which provide women with reproductive services being defunded. As a result, millions of women have nowhere else to turn for reliable contraceptives and safe abortion services.

And to drive the matter home, just two weeks ago, medical doctor and reproductive rights activist, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, was left visibly frustrated as an interviewer on Afrovoices derailed a discussion about abortion access into a debate about whether or not it was the duty of black African women to birth African populations comparable to India and China.

Earlier this year, I attended a talk held at Wits Junction about access to abortion titled Whose body is it anyway? In many ways, this question has become only more relevant in 2018. To whom do women’s bodies belong? To lawmakers in faraway countries who can cut off access to reproductive services with the stroke of a pen? To future armies and workforces who need someone to provide them with young, healthy bodies? To governments who can pressure women into taking potentially harmful hormonal birth control for the sake of being economical? Or to hypothetical husbands whose feelings must be accounted for in our present day medical decisions?

What these questions point to is the invasive policing of our bodies. The societal pressure we face to have children, combined with the increasing restrictions women the world over face on reproductive healthcare, has created a suffocating scenario in which we are beginning to lose control over our own bodies. As some women resort to desperate methods like backstreet abortions to cling to that control, others deal with the devastating consequences of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies which, ironically, are often derided by the same people who oppose reproductive justice in the first place.

I believe it is impossible to envision women’s liberation without reproductive justice, because of the many ways that a lack of access to reliable contraceptives and safe abortion services directly harm the wellbeing of women. As we move into Women’s Month the central question we should be asking ourselves when it comes to reproductive issues, such access to abortions and contraceptives, should be “whose body is it anyway?”

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Slice of life: The blessing of independence from the women who raised me

by | May 15, 2018 | Opinion

My mother and grandmother are two strong women in my life who have contributed to my strong and independent character.

They have been the sole providers in my brother’s and my life, making sure that ends met so we could have everything we needed.

But they have done more than that, having taught me how to survive without depending on anyone else.

They taught me courage, self-sufficiency and independence as I witnessed how they both struggled but always provided for our family.

For as long as I can remember, I have always feared having to depend on someone else because I could not help but feel like I was imposing. In higher primary school, I refused to ask for help with my homework as I would think to myself: “If my grandmother can fix broken pipes, floors and ceilings around the house by herself, what is stopping me from figuring out primary school homework alone?”

My grandmother is somewhat of a stubborn woman, a trait that has rubbed off on me. She refuses to rely on a man to fix anything around the house. I used to get frustrated when she would ask me to help her cement the bathroom floor or to take the garbage away in a wheelbarrow to the dumping site, instead of telling my older brother to do it.

Eventually I came to appreciate her showing me how to perform these duties. I’ve learnt that I can do anything for myself without adopting the stereotypical attitude of, “this is a man’s job”. Limitations based on gender do not exist in my head because of my grandmother’s teaching.

My mother too, taught me valuable life lessons. “You need to work hard for yourself. You do not want to be at the mercy of anyone, especially a man,” she has always told me.

Determined not to rely on anyone, I decided to use my talents to make my own money. I began a hair braiding business at 15, inspired by my mother’s advice and my paternal grandmother and aunts who are very good at braiding hair. This is a skill that I am fortunate enough to have inherited.

By braiding people’s hair I am able to make pocket money for myself and help my family by contributing towards household expenses. I started off by braiding my family’s hair for free to perfect my skills, and went on to start charging my neighbours R150 to braid their hair.

My hair business was at its peak in third year at Wits when I stayed in a student residence in Braamfontein. There, a lot of young women came to my room every weekend so I could do their hair. This helped a lot because I could buy groceries and necessities for myself without burdening my family with requests for money.

Staying in Braamfontein was particularly good for my business because there is a huge market for braids and I was easily accessible, living in student housing with most of my customers. I also charged affordable prices, taking into consideration the financial constraints faced by most students. I did so, however, without compromising the end result that my customers were looking for.

In early 2013, my little sister was born and I became the middle child. The very fact that I am someone’s older sister motivates me to work even harder at being financially independent. I love spoiling those who are closest to me. I constantly want to make sure that my sister gets anything she wants. More importantly, I want to lead by example and show her that a girl can do anything without relying on anyone but herself.

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SLICE OF LIFE: The message in a bottle

by | Apr 20, 2018 | Opinion

My name is Tshego Mokgabudi and I am a substance abuser.

Like a large number of people my age, I indulge in drinking and smoking, often.

I have not always seen this as a problem. As long as it did not affect my schoolwork and relationships then I felt it was all fine. But after speaking to a very brave and inspiring man, Kolopo Kganyago, a Bachelor of Education graduate who beat his addictions, I came to realise that maybe all wasn’t so well with myself.

He told me the story of his fight with substance abuse and, in his story, I found many of the same difficulties in my own life.

My substances are cigarettes and booze. I drink alcohol almost every second day and buy a box of cigarettes at the same rate. Honestly speaking, this has been the case since I was in first year. I am in my honours now. Scary.

I began drinking when I was 14 and began drinking on a daily basis when I left home for varsity at 18. I think the fact that I no longer had my mom’s hawk eyes watching over me every day really did create a sense of liberation in me. In this liberation, I revelled socially as my drinking got worse and worse. At first, drinking seemed like fun but more and more it became a compulsion.

On a daily basis I battle with depression, anxiety, loneliness and everything else that comes with being in your early 20s. Maybe I see these substances as some kind of solution.

When you’re six or seven beers down on a Tuesday night, not having started an assignment due the next morning, everything really does get overwhelming. That’s when I had to admit to myself that I do have a problem.

Our image of a person struggling with substance abuse often is someone with needle pricks all up their arm. Or someone stealing money from friends and family just to feed their habits. I find that that makes it harder for us to see ourselves in that light. It is almost as if we don’t fit the profile then we’re alright.

I like to believe that I’m a good person. I have a good relationship with my mom with whom I speak daily. I have a good relationship with my brother and friends, many of whom are from my primary school days. I’m in a romantic relationship and I like to think I give it my all. That’s why I didn’t see myself as fitting the profile of a substance abuser.

I realise now that the problem was exactly that. I was too afraid to be honest with myself.

Looking back, I think that is one of the reasons why substance abuse is so dangerous. It is not reflected upon. It is unacknowledged. It is the unspoken. When you talk about it, people don’t appreciate the bravery it takes to admit these things.

It begins with admitting to yourself that you are a substance abuser and working out why it is you are one.

Look at the triggers that make you want a drink or a smoke and remove them from your life.

Figure out which environments and friends are enablers for your problem and cut them out.

These are the little ways that I have been trying to work on my habit since admitting to myself that I have a problem.

Every day is a struggle but taking it one step at a time really does make all the difference.

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SLICE OF LIFE: Social media has taken over my life

by | Apr 6, 2018 | Opinion

Social media continues its pursuit to take over my daily life. I am probably a better photojournalist on Instagram than most professionals and I have developed better investigative skills than the FBI.

I have come to a realisation that my activity on social media is far greater than the average joe. Or is it?

I constantly ask myself what life would be like without the various social media accounts that I have, and if the time and effort I put into each of them is actually worth it.

Posting pictures on Instagram used to be a daily activity until it became more like a full-time job. It takes me a good couple of hours to decide which photo I should put up on Instagram. I question every single thing about the photo.  Should it be in black and white? Would it look better if it had a filter that makes me look tanned? Does this photo match the scheme of my profile feed? I also struggle to find the perfect caption. Should it be funny, philosophical or even relate to my picture at all? I have spent countless hours scrolling through Pinterest trying to find a decent caption that fits my picture and then I just end up using an emoticon anyway. The amount of effort I put into posting one picture makes me wonder about the precious time I have just wasted.

It’s a bit of a catch-22 really. A world without social media would not allow me to do the small things in life that I enjoy. Facebook lets me check up on friends who I haven’t seen since high school. I can watch my cousins grow up in America without missing out on their milestones.

But social media sucks me in. One minute I’m watching a video of a man who ran the Two Oceans Marathon on crutches and two hours later, I’m watching a video of a dog barking to its favourite song.

My mornings usually begin with checking my cellphone and spending endless time checking my social media accounts. The process starts with WhatsApp, then I switch over to Facebook to check whose birthday it is (I would never remember otherwise). Then I have to catch up on what’s happening on Snapchat stories and liking pictures on Instagram. I watch people skydive in Dubai and think of all the activities I could be doing if I left my bed.

I finish off this ritual with a good scroll through Twitter, trying to find out the latest news in hopes that I will pass the week’s current news pop quiz. When I’ve completed all these chores, I finally feel ready to get out of bed.

As a student journalist, social media has become essential in my life. Twitter helps me stay tapped into up-to-the-minute news. I also share stories I have produced on there. Not everyone reads newspapers anymore and without social media, I’m not too sure how people find my stories.

Social media has truly become so rooted in my life that even my decisions are dictated by the things I see on Apps on my phone. Zomato decides where I want to go out for dinner. If I need to contact someone for a story, I tweet them.

At the end of the day, I’ve come to terms with my social media dependency. My relationship with my phone is not an abnormality, I actually think it’s become the norm in my generation.

If I had one rand for every time I looked at my social media accounts, I would be a millionaire.

Hold that thought while I go decide what photo I’m going to post on Instagram next.

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