Part 1: Life and death I am writing this post from the shores of beautiful Lake Bunyonyi in the south of Uganda. I have just watched the dark clouds push through the emerald green valley where the lake is nestled, bringing a whipping wind and a burst of rain to clear the air. My cold […]

Graeme Blundell, in his assessment of the public broadcasting station SBS, blithely observed that ‘turning thirty is difficult’. A couple of weeks ago Insight on SBS demonstrated just that. The program exhibited the fraught politics and murky ideological realities present when it comes to issues of religion and its place within Australia’s multicultural landscape, but […]

I read of an exchange that took place between a British journalist who arrived in Rwanda in 1995 and an aid worker who had seen atrocities taking place in one of the refugee camps at around the same time. They were discussing the merits of leaving corpses as they had fallen at sites of massacre […]

On the ferry between Pemba Island and mainland Tanzania there was a video playing in the lounge area. It was, as a man I met on the trip described, ‘preaching to pictures’. I met Abdul in a cheap guesthouse the night before the weekly ferry was due to leave for mainland. He is one of […]

For the last few weeks, we’ve learned, over and over again, why the burqa must be banned. A visible face is, apparently, central to Western modernity (which is why, one imagines, that new-fangled device known as the telephone will never catch on). Besides, outlawing the burqa is a feminist cause – to preserve women’s right […]