As a young girl, I was overburdened by the issue of women and happiness, and the circumstances of my surroundings plagued with domestic violence, abuse and women’s absolute dependence on their men made the burden ever so heavy. My name is Mbong, I am a wife, a mother, a career woman and a writer. At…
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The Little Blonde Girl in My Nightmare
It was a freezing winter morning but it wasn’t the cold or the dimness of winter dawn that scared me. For the first time in my twelve years as an immigrant in South Africa, I was in a mini van taxi, a Kombi as it’s called here and with no other passengers in sight, I…
The Pledge of an Evolved Feminist
The Pledge of an Evolved Feminist is a personalisation of the ‘The Memorandum of an Evolved Feminist’. In my journey, I questioned, I challenged and sometimes disagreed with basic tenets of the feminist movement. I thought I failed but indeed it was an amazing personal evolution. What good is feminism, if not to make women…
The Memorandum of a Modern Day Feminist
The Feminist Movement has done so much for women and at the core of ‘The Memorandum of a Modern Day Feminist is gratitude. Gratitude for the freedom that the movement has afforded women. The undeniable freedom to be whatever you choose to be. And second to that gratitude is the acknowledgement that an Evolved Feminist…
A Call to Africanity, Identity and Self-Love
So it seems everyone else gets it. My French friends drive french cars, My Japanese colleagues Japanese cars. Trust me, my German acquaintances do the same and my Jewish and Chinese friends take the concept of identity and self love to a whole new level. Granted, there are no African cars in the market for…
The Evolved Feminist
These are the stories of women making informed choices to build happiness for themselves and harmony in their families, communities and in society. It is the story of the architect, the doctor who has placed her career on hold to raise her children. It is the story of a single mom who juggles two jobs…
The Untold Stories that Spark Outrage and Why it is Never Only About Race
In my previous blog on racism – ‘Racism Cannot Survive Justice and Humanity’ – I made the point that most blacks don’t fundamentally care about the ideology that one race might consider itself as superior to another – which is essentially the starting point for racism. This is because more and more black people feel…
Lebo wasn’t Racist
Lebo was my first black South African friend. She was bold, confident, fearless and intelligent. Our friendship was brief, it only lasted through our post graduate honours year, but it was intense, it was unique, it was an eye opener. Lebo was born in South Africa, along with its history and racially tense past. Unlike…
My Perfect Black World
For a long time I thought I didn’t care about racism but the truth is, I had very little reason to. I was born in Cameroon. At the age of four, I went to primary school and for seven years all my teachers were blacks. At eleven I went to secondary school and for another…
Racism can Never Survive Justice and Humanity
Let’s cut to the chase with a quick definition of racism. Whichever dictionary you choose to use, racism will generally be defined by as many words, superiority, antagonism, prejudice, resentment, of one race over another. Trust me, no matter which definition we go by, there’s a good chance we do demonstrate unconscious racial bias every…