Claim OwnershipDon't Shoot The Messenger
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Don’t Shoot the Messenger is a podcast brought to you by South Africa’s leading independent news and analysis website, the Daily Maverick. We take you into the stories behind the stories, to give you a fresh view and new insight on some of the most important topics of the moment.
31 Episodes
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You can only address gender-based violence in the long term through major structural reform. But South Africa’s women don’t have the long term: they need to be safe now. In the final episode of our third season, we’re talking to a Cape Flats activist who used the sale of koeksisters during lockdown as a pretence to offer battered women shelter. And we’re speaking to a British academic who believes her work with churches can provide a model for other countries with strong religious institutions. Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze. This podcast has been sponsored by Ninety One.
Would you pay to attend a dinner party at which you’re told that you are probably more racist than you realise? A business established by two women of colour in the USA invites white women to do just that - and hear some hard truths. In this episode, we’re talking to Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, founders of the controversial project Race2Dinner.
MUSIC: Oh Freedom! (Slave spiritual folk song) by Sound of Joy & Oh Freedom! as sung by the Golden Gospel Singers
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Ninety One.
Is there any way to “solve” racism? Are there any means by which we can achieve true racial reconciliation? In this episode, we’re looking at the example of Rwanda, a country torn apart by deadly ethnic divisions in the 1990s, whose government argues it has largely achieved national peace post genocide. And we’re talking to a man who bears one of the notorious surnames in the history of South Africa – who has made it his life’s mission to help undo the damage of his forebears.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Ninety One.
Women’s sport in South Africa is still decades and decades behind the state of play for men. In this episode, we’re talking to Daily Maverick’s resident sports guru and the current Springbok women’s rugby coach, exploring how the USA managed to create the world’s most successful women’s soccer industry within two generations, and busting some of those tired myths you still hear all the time – like that “women’s sport just can’t attract any money because nobody wants to watch it”.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Ninety One.
Social media is making us more unhappy, less safe, and in some cases just stupider. This while the power of these websites grows unstoppably: Facebook now has more adherents than Christianity. In this episode we’re taking on just two aspects of the social media problem: the way it spreads fake news, and the vicious nature of the conversation. We’re looking at a counter-intuitively simple fix for the issue of misinformation, and talking to a South African researcher who is using the tricks of trolls and bots for good rather than evil.
Additional Resources:
Full interview between Fairfax Media’s Ginger Gorman and ‘Mark’, the troll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNCTBtpf_pI
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Ninety One.
Ever since the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was targeted in 2015, statues of apartheid and colonial figures around South Africa have been vandalised. What the hell should we do with them? In this episode, we’re asking what the best way is for South Africa to grapple with the past. We're talking to a professor who has made it his business to see Cecil John Rhodes account for his deeds - in fictional form; and to a museum curator whose job it is to collect Germany's most toxic monuments.
Additional reading: The Trial of Cecil John Rhodes by Adekeye Adebayo (Jacana, 2021)
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Ninety One.
South Africa is literally running out of places to store its rubbish: the City of Johannesburg has warned that its landfills are almost full. Who wants to live in Trashzania? In this episode, we are taking on the country’s littering epidemic. We’re talking to an academic and an activist who help explain why this issue is neither trivial nor middle-class; exploring one of the most successful anti-littering campaigns in history: and speaking to someone on the team which designed a simple but brilliant local product: a giant vacuum cleaner for the beach.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix and theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
Giving people free money? That might sound like the last thing South Africa can afford. But numerous studies have found that giving people a universal basic income grant leads to the funds being used in productive ways which both improve people’s quality of life and boost the economy more widely. In a country with SA’s levels of unemployment, it just might be the only sensible next step.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix and original music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
We’re constantly told that education is the single most important service to get right to secure South Africa’s future. In this episode, we’re speaking to an expert on probably the world’s most respected school system, chatting to someone who toured schools all around South Africa to get a sense of what makes the good ones good, and along the way we are busting some of the myths that have built up over the years around this troublesome topic.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze. How To Fix South Africa’s Schools: Lessons From Schools That Work (2014) · ‘Schools That Work’
The latest crime stats prove that the violent crime rates in South Africa are getting worse. In this episode, we hear about a country which turned around its crime situation in the 90s, talk to a woman with a simple but brilliant solution to keep people safer in high crime areas, and learn what’s regarded as the most important measures to take towards establishing a crime-free society long term.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and written and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original music and sound mix by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Ninety One.
Ninety One SA (Pty) Ltd is an authorised financial services provider.
In our third season we're exploring ideas on how to fix things in South Africa. We all know the problems: education, crime, poverty, inequality. Now we want to focus on how they can overcome, looking at innovative local solutions and answers that have worked elsewhere in the world. Join us for Season 3 of Don’t Shoot The Messenger, launching on the 1st of March 2021.
As a young man, Rodney Wilkinson won Springbok colours in fencing - but he would enter the South African history books in a different way. On 16 December 1982, Rodney set four bombs inside the Koeberg nuclear power station in Cape Town. They were timed to explode 24 hours later - and explode they did, while Rodney had already ridden to safety on a bicycle across the South African border. We travelled to hear the story from Rodney Wilkinson himself.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Investec.
Professor Renfrew Christie risked death by hanging to spy on the apartheid government’s power stations - using his doctoral thesis as a pretext to gain access to the plants in order to gather intel. He became South Africa’s pioneering nuclear whistleblower. In this week’s episode, he explains how he wrote a confession read aloud in court to provide information on how Cape Town’s nuclear power station could be bombed without loss of human life.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
This podcast has been sponsored by Investec.
On 26 September, Cape Town was rocked by tremors after an earthquake occurred off the South African coast. The incident was minor, but it got a lot of people wondering about South Africa’s preparedness in the event of a(nother) major disaster. In this episode, we speak to a disaster management specialist, an earthquake expert, and an activist who has been horrified for years by the risk posed by Koeberg nuclear power station.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
When legal advocacy group Ndifuna Ukwazi launched a 2019 campaign to have Rondebosch Golf Club land re-allocated for affordable housing, it was revealed that the club was paying less than R1000 rent a year for hectares of public land. In this episode, we take a look at those crazy leases - and find that around the country, some golf courses on municipal land are paying as little as R20 rent per year. You read that right: R20 annually.
In this episode, we have no trouble making the case against golf in South Africa in 2020 - but in the interests of fairness, we take a look at the other side too.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
On this week’s show, we’re exploring the global movement called QAnon: a web of conspiracy theories, fantasies and lies which may have started in the head of a former tech journalist from Johannesburg, but which has spread to the United States Congress and the White House. And we’re looking at its growing hold on South African social media users too – many of whom may not even realise that they are playing into a vast and very dangerous game.
Additional Resources:
For further information on the possible true identity of Q, listen to episode 166 of the excellent podcast Reply All.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
A teacher logs on to a WhatsApp group at a specified time. All students who are present send emojis to indicate their readiness. And so class begins.
This is what education has looked like in some parts of South Africa during the Covid-19 lockdown, with teachers, NGOs and businesses scrambling to find ways to keep pupils learning from afar. The innovation is there, the technology is available, and online teaching does away with some of the practical problems which plague the local education system.
So in this week’s episode of our podcast, we’re asking: Could virtual learning offer the key to boosting South Africa’s schooling even in non-lockdown times?
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
NGOs and businesses mentioned in this episode:
Olico Mathematics Education: https://learn.olico.org/
Axium Education: https://www.axiumeducation.org/
Digicampus: https://www.digicampus.co.za/
Stephen McGown is regarded as Al-Qaeda’s longest surviving hostage. Since his release in 2017, he has been putting his life back together, and is working on a book about his experience. In this episode, he discusses the profound strangeness of trying to readjust to normal life after losing 6 years - and his ultimate feelings on Al-Qaeda may surprise you.
Six Years With Al-Qaeda: The Stephen McGown Story will be published by Maverick 451 in late November. Keep an eye on the Daily Maverick website for further details.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
Your local bookstore will definitely stock ‘Harry Potter’, but when it comes to South African kids’ books featuring children of colour, all bets are off. The local publishing industry admits there’s a big problem - but just how big, nobody knows.
In this episode, we speak to local writers Buhle Ngaba and Mohale Mashigo about the crisis in representation that led to them creating their own work for South African children. Pan MacMillan publishers Miemie du Plessis and Sibongile Machika talk frankly about the issues - and also argue that the publishing industry is not entirely to blame.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
Since a March 2017 Western Cape High Court ruling, you can’t be arrested for smoking marijuana within your own home in South Africa. But that doesn’t mean marijuana is legal: you still can’t buy it or sell it anywhere. It’s also been totally unclear how much weed you’re allowed to possess for your own use.
The courts gave Parliament two years to draw up the necessary laws to take South Africa out of legal limbo. With the deadline about to run out, a draft bill has been produced - which both weed advocates and lawyers say is a disaster. In this episode, we explore the ways in which users and businesses are currently exploiting the loopholes in law, and look at why the proposed legislation is problematic.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee and presented by Rebecca Davis with editing by Tevya Turok Shapiro, original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support by Kathryn Kotze.
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