An interesting... and great South African feeling

I am feeling so good about SA at the moment, and surprisingly, none of it has to do with the World Cup.

How's this for a good progressive week?

1) The rugby in Orlando

Not only did we have the allegedly Afrikanerdom team playing the allegedly Afrikanerdom sport being played in the allegedly Afrikanerdom-hating Soweto, we got great results! If, 15 years ago you'd told people that the spierwit Blou Bulle supporters would flood to a fixture in Soweto, the Boeremag would have bleksemmed you. But do you know what? It happened. And once again folks across a bunch of races got on like houses on fire - and proved again that it's the political leaders who foster race issues. Not us folks who actually live here.

2) Reaction to Zapiro's cartoon

Did you all see Zapiro's cartoon last week? Well, the Mail and Guardian ran a cartoon depicting the phophet Muhammed and there was a bit of a shitfest. The M&Gand Nic Dawes (editor of M&G) met with Muslim leaders and other folks and thrashed out the issue. You can see Dawes' and M&G's response here. What this meant is that once again we showed that South Africans still have the ability to exist together across many different cultures. In Europe this Islamaphobic fight is carried out every day. In South Africa we found a resolution and learnt. This is good progressive thinking! They haven't managed that in First World Washington or London. But we managed it in Jozi.

3) ANC loses by-elections

The DA won two-by elections in the Western Cape yesterday (ANC lost another ward to an independent candidate in Limpopo too). I am not really a Darkies Aside sympathiser, but am hugely in favour of anything that moves us further away from the one-party state we are. I don't want any political party having such a firm grip on power. The fact that this was won in a predominantly black area (from what I understand), also means we might, as a nation, be moving away from voting along colour lines - if that's not healthy politics then I don't know what is.

So, all in all, I'm pretty chuffed.

What do you reckon?