Life
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This week, I found myself sitting for hours in a packed public hospital waiting room. The queue barely moved. Plastic chairs scraped on the floor, babies cried somewhere in the distance, and every few minutes someone would sigh loudly and ask, “Who’s the last one in the line?” It was the kind of scene that…
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There is a quiet moment that comes before any serious act of writing. It is not the moment of inspiration, as it is often described. Not a sudden idea or a clear sentence forming fully in the mind. It is something slower, less certain. A kind of hesitation. The recognition that there is something you…
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There is a particular kind of reading experience that is difficult to explain without sounding as though something improbable has occurred. You are reading as you always do, moving through sentences, following an argument, inhabiting a voice, and then something shifts. A line stops you. Not because it is especially beautiful, or clever, or even…
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On 25 May Africa celebrates. And it has good reason to do so. While today is officially Africa Day, a day noting the formation in 1963 of the Organisation African Unity, now the African Union, it is worthwhile using this day to reflect on our perceptions of the continent. Africa has, through recent history, been…