Category: Thinking Out Loud

Last night I was sharing testimonies with my cell group from church, and I kept getting the same reactions. “Wow.”“No way.”“Are you serious?” I get these a lot. And I understand why. There’s the story of a stranger who paid R95 000 for my university fees in 2019 – someone who, to this day, wants…

I am typing this exact sentence in the wee hours with only my right hand. I have a fleece over my thighs and a dodgy-looking black beanie… because the streets are cold. Why only one hand? Because my left hand is resting on my cheek, deeply disappointed and annoyed by a football result. I’ll be…

When I was 8 years old my mother enrolled me in an English-medium school in town… a school where everything was taught in English, including English itself. I was coming from a village school five minutes from home where we even learned English in IsiXhosa. This new place was a different world. You were even…

When I was 15, I did something stupid.The irony is, I thought I was being smart. I was in Grade 10, and we often had to write essays for different subjects. One day, our Life Sciences teacher gave us an assignment: The Effects of Deforestation. Because it had the furthest deadline, I told myself I’d…

If you’ve been around computers long enough you might have heard the term “bug” – a flaw or error in a software program that causes it to behave unexpectedly. There are debates over who coined it. Some credit Thomas Edison in an 1878 letter. Others credit Grace Hopper, the American computer scientist and mathematician, who…

In primary school, we were subjected to the torture of writing essays on our first day back from the holidays. It was torture because the essays were in Afrikaans and I wasn’t a big fan of the subject.. mostly because I sucked at it. So writing a full one-page opstel (“composition”) was never fun for…

It’s interesting how most people – myself included – avoid thinking about their own death. Understandably, it’s a dark topic that can drain the mood in any room. Growing up in the village, elders would scold you for mentioning death: “Suthetha ngokufa uyahlola” (Stop talking about death; you’re speaking it into existence). And like the…

The first TV I remember at home was a small, black-and-white Japanese set, about 11 inches wide. I still can’t believe black-and-white TVs and chunky phones with aerials existed in my lifetime, even though I’m still fairly young. It’s amazing how quickly time has moved, and how vivid those memories remain. That little TV had…

At the time of writing this, it’s 2025… and the dating pool? It’s less pool, more like a sewage dam. Women are making money twerking on an app called “OnlyFans” and calling themselves “influencers.” I still don’t know what they’re influencing, son, but that’s the job title. Twerking, by the way, is basically dancing with…