Table of contents for June - September 2021 in Womankind

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

Have you ever felt the sensation that something is wrong in your life? At its worst it could feel like a sense of imminent disaster, or just a mild case of uncertainty, and it can happen even when things feel somewhat ‘right’. You could be reasonably happy in your line of work, and enjoy the company of your closest friends, but then this feeling erupts out of nowhere and you look around almost expecting something to tumble from the skies. When you view zebras in the wild, casually grazing in the savannah, you don’t typically regard the zebra as suffering from any kind of stress or what we call modern-day anxiety. But if we were to measure the zebra’s cortisol levels, the stress chemical, you’d see it rise and fall…

A few weeks ago, I came across a saying that I had never heard before: every meeting ends in parting. A fresh experience of this simple, bittersweet fact of life touched my heart. It felt particularly moving in the context of this long, dark season of our shared global life in which there has been so much grief and loss. The phrase is drawn from a larger Buddhist teaching that expands its resonance in these times: Everything coming together falls apart. Everything rising up collapses. Every meeting ends in parting. Every life ends in death. Here is a fundamental truth about life that is both straightforward and paradoxical. It has to do with the inevitability of time’s impact on our lives. We are born and we die. Yes, of course,…

Growing up as a white person in Johannesburg in the 1980s, Nicky Falkof remembers the live-in domestic workers who served her family and friends. They cleaned and they cooked. Yet, when it came to their own mealtimes, they were forced to use their own cutlery. “There was a taboo against the physical intimacy of sharing crockery,” recalls Falkof. White families were horrified by the notion of contamination - despite the fact that these women prepared their meals, did their washing, and made their beds. Apartheid finally ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela led the African National Congress (ANC) to victory. Decades of racist policy were overturned. These included the banning of interracial marriage and the use of separate spaces for different races, from beaches to buses to bathrooms. Yet the…

I’ve learnt from my dad to believe in the dream. He’s always dreamed big, and when he is confronted with obstacles, he just shifts the dream, or he just shifts the plan. He doesn’t ever give up on the dream. He’s the eternal optimist, there is no problem that’s unsolvable or insurmountable. My dad is an author, businessman, and teacher. He’s done everything from raising pigs and chickens, selling coffee, to teaching at high school and drama troops, starting a stationery business, to writing several books that have been used across East Africa as study material in schools, and he now runs a factory in Johannesburg. He is not married to identity. I mean, he’s been everything. And here was me thinking that everything in life had to be linear.…

Can you describe what it was like to grow up in a rural town in South Africa? It’s strange but I grew up in a place that was actually a war zone, but I feel like I had the most beautiful childhood. I was born in a small village in KwaZulu-Natal. And within that village, I don’t know if many know much about the Zulu people - they’re very tribal, and within the Zulu tribe there are separate family tribes, and village tribes, and so forth. And they tend to gravitate towards conflict. So, when I was growing up, a war started. It started in 1974, and it’s still ongoing today. It tends to flare up some years and then it dies down. But when I was a little girl,…

“I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said.”Thuli Madonsela Closing date: 31 JULY 2021 Format: One photograph per entry. Applicants: Open to all amateur and professional photographers. Entries must also include a separate photo of an edition of Womankind. File size: Please send large file sizes (larger than 3,000 pixels wide, 300dpi). Entries must be provided in file sizes suitable for publishing. The theme of this quarter’s award is Inspiration, meaning forces of influence - either people, places, ideas, experiences - which inspire you to do something in life, and to be creative. Win $500 and get published in the next issue of Womankind magazine womankindmag.com/award…

When you meet someone new and you wish to understand them better, find out what makes them feel important. This small insight never fails to shed light on why people do what they do, what motivates them, and even how they spend their money. For instance, it’ll give an insight into why the highly-paid surgeon drives a run-down car, commending themselves on the fact that their car is in fact the oldest ‘bomb’ in the carpark, or conversely, when another prowls the neighbourhood tucked inside their luxury sedan costing many times their annual salary. When you meet someone new and you wish to understand them better, find out what makes them feel important. Rudolf Clausius’s First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed - it can…

Last Monday, I was sitting in my car, catching up on admin on my phone, when I caught myself trying to change the birthdate on my yoga studio membership page. Embarrassed at the idea that the teachers who trained me last year could, at any time, find out my advanced age, I thought to move my birthdate to the mid-1960s, giving myself the grace of a few more years in my 50s. Not a big cheat, I thought to myself, Trumpishly. A minute later, I thought better of it. But I did want to do this. In Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the heroine, Hester Prynne, is forced to pin a red ‘A’ to her dress to signify her fallen status. I am not a fallen woman. Even so, the…

You were born in Kenya and were brought up in Uganda. Describe for us your memories of growing up in Africa? My parents left the UK soon after the war to expand their horizons, and so they started in Uganda - where one of my sisters was born - and then went to Kenya and then back to Uganda. My father was with the post office in telecommunications, and I did my primary school in Uganda. I was a tomboy, out doors all the time. My mother used to try and bribe my sisters to get me to read, but I’d sooner be outside playing and climbing trees. We were involved in sailing, and I used to fish down at the sailing club. I absolutely loved it. So when I…

My name is Amyna. I was born in Cape Town in an area called Maitland, but before I turned three, we moved to an area in Port Elizabeth. And before I turned six, we moved again. My father was a fugitive from the law. My father had been a soldier of World War II, forced into the army. In other words, conscripted and trained. And when they came back, they were not paid. My father became politicised by that. Professionally, he’d been a teacher. A teacher of both Islam and secular. So, he became very angry, and he became an activist. So when I was born, he was pursued by police. We were running away all the time. By the time I was four years old, according to my mum,…

You have recently written a book titled How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Why did you choose this topic to write about? My mission is to bring empirically validated science to people who might not get it otherwise. Mental healthcare is expensive, especially in the US, and not everybody has insurance. Private practice often costs a lot of money. I think it’s not fair that only people who are quite well off can afford scientifically validated mental health treatment, so for the cost of a book I aim to be a bridge between the ivory tower and the community. My goal is to disseminate scientifically validated techniques, hence this book. I was frustrated that the best of the science was staying in academics…

Because her voice on the page was outspoken and forthright, people were often surprised, on meeting South African author Nadine Gordimer, to see how physically diminutive she was. They would be unwise, however, to underestimate her flinty fortitude and determination. “Despite her minute size, she was a huge presence,” said Margaret Atwood on Gordimer’s death in 2014, “a voice of rectitude that spoke above the political din, addressing itself to our common humanity.” “The main thing to me about literature is that it should be in some way illuminating, that it should tell you something about how people feel, and to explain something of the mystery of life.” Politicised and influential, Gordimer’s literary career included a Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize, but this ‘voice of rectitude’ found…

Nelson Mandela made it clear throughout his political life that his contribution in the struggle against apartheid always involved working with comrades. Included were his close friends Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu and he expressed his love for Bram Fischer in Long Walk to Freedom. There were many others, two of whom were comrades Ruth First and Joe Slovo. First and Slovo married in 1949, but their relationships with Nelson Mandela started earlier, in the mid-1940s, while all three were students at the University of Witwatersrand. Besides collaborating on various protest actions, they were often together at Ismail Meer’s flat, the hub for young revolutionary South Africans in Johannesburg between 1943 and 1946. Mandela as well as other comrades described Meer’s flat as “dreary, badly furnished, and depressing,” yet Nelson…

Antonia Case:  Antonia Case is Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Womankind, and Editorial Director of New Philosopher. She was awarded the 2016 AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media. Her forthcoming book Flourish will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore is a British journalist who lives in New York. She writes for New Philosopher, The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine. JenniferKunst: Jennifer Kunst is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, working in private practice in California. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California and an adjunct associate professor at the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. She is the…

Life can feel at times like a conveyor belt, forever compelling us forward into the future, and we aid this onward motion with our busyness. We make calls and plans, organise ourselves and others, a lurching towards some distant place where we think, “at that point, I will slow down and appreciate what I find”. But not now. Psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach thinks this onward motion needs a daily readjustment, what she calls the “sacred pause”. To pause is to interrupt temporarily, to suspend motion and thought. A timestamp when we are not bound by the prospect of a goal. “The pause can occur in the midst of almost any activity and can last for an instant,” she writes. In her book, Radical Acceptance, Brach describes a bull…

When artist Tawny Chatmon’s father died, the loss awakened something in her, and she began to see her camera no longer as a means to just make a living, but as a tool to create meaning. “I began to think more about the world I wanted my children to grow up in versus the world as it is today,” she notes. While photography is the first layer of communication, in Deeply Embedded she layers antique batik patterns and photographs from Africa to tell her story. “One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don’t know how to do, to keep learning.”Ruth Reichl…

Marianne Fassler has lived in her home in Saxonwold, Johannesburg, for 45 years. “I moved into the house in 1976 when everyone else was leaving the country,” she says. “It was cheap. And my parents lived down the road.” It’s the kind of late-1920s double-storey typical of the area. When she married her husband, businessman Charles Bothner, they added to it to create more space, so their children could visit whenever they wanted. “Charles and I are both entrepreneurial, so we work from home,” she adds. It has layers of old and new, of space for living and space for working. Fassler, whose maiden name is van der Wat, was born in Johannesburg to a long lineage of Afrikaners. Her first ancestor to arrive in South Africa from Europe worked…

My name is Refiloe Molefe, I’m 61 years old and I’m a farmer. I was born in Mafikeng, but when I was born, my mother passed away. She was working in the kitchens as a domestic worker. But she died, and I was taken care of by her cousin who was working as a nurse. My father, I didn’t know him. Growing up, I never saw my mother or father, so when I see underprivileged children today, I say, “These children are just like me.” I was always strong. I would walk on my own everywhere, not scared of anything. But when I grew up, I knew I had to give back to my community. Because it takes a village to raise a child. I’m standing here because of everyone…

Alexis Christodoulou began creating 3D architectural spaces while working as a copywriter in an advertising agency in Cape Town. He learnt the tools of the trade by firstly watching online videos. Creating architectural renderings of beautiful and stylish interiors was for Christodoulou a way to escape and daydream, and today, Christodoulou works with commercial clients who too share his vision of a beautiful world in 3D. To create his pieces, Christodoulou uses computer software such as Cinema 4D, Redshift, Photoshop, and Lightroom. He specialises in synthesising elements such as water, stone, and flora, bringing the external world into interiors and vice-versa. How did you first come about creating ‘Imaged Architectural Spaces’? I was playing around in 3D while working in my advertising job, about 10 years ago now. I noticed…

If you ask my mother, she will tell you that I’ve always been an artist of some sort. I’ve always collected and repurposed things. I created paper dolls, collages, and little art books as well as digital drawings in Microsoft Paint and Paintbrush as a child. I always thought I’d be an actress. My aunt ran a theatre company and I also trained in other theatrical programs growing up. My father was in the military, so my sisters and I had the opportunity to travel a lot. We lived in the US as well as Germany and Japan. I was a free-spirited child whose brain was always full of ideas, thoughts, and questions. I actually didn’t begin taking photos until I was around 15 years old, and even then I…

“Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.”Nadine Gordimer African American Women Writers Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr A comprehensive anthology of an extraordinary range of voices from African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. This collection comprises work from 49 writers across memoir, poetry, and essays, on social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights. A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous 19th century. No Time Like the Present By Nadine Gordimer In No Time Like the Present, Nadine Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a ‘mixed’ couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle…