Wessel Ebersohn's Blog, page 4

Magic in the Water

 So you don’t believe in magic? You think that everything in life must have a rational explanation?  Well, maybe, but then again maybe not. I spoke to a lady whose home was filled with the pungent smell of burning incense. “What’s that about?” I asked. “It attracts money,” she said,

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Some Laws Collapse Under Their Own Weight

South Africans are burdened by a lot of strange laws. Perhaps those around black economic empowerment are the strangest of all. The name of the legislation sounds wonderful, but a number of people, some black, have told me that in their world BEE stands for black elite enrichment. Under apartheid

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Mathematics and the Bureaucrat

So you thought that mathematics and bureaucracy have nothing to do with each other. Well, that is not exactly so. Mix them up together and you get an omelette that is often inedible, but sometimes unavoidable. Many, many years ago, decades ago in fact, I was employed by the engineering

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Personality After Death

“Do you believe in life after death?” I was asked recently by a friend. “Certainly,” I said. “Not only do I believe in it. I have proof.” “Oh, really?” he said, an eyebrow raised sceptically. So I told him the story of my mother’s ashes. “And you imagine that proves

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Please Contact Us Here

We did our utmost to write a polite letter. We were writing to Eskom and they have a lot of influence in our lives. They are, after all, the people who decide when we will have electricity and when not. This was not about the matter of power cuts though.

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A Mother-in-law’s Revenge

Never make friends with a fiction writer. Your supposed friend may base a character in a book on you. And for them everyone is fair game, even his or her mother or grandmother, not to mention husband, wife or children. And, if he does base a character on you, don’t

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The Cottage Lock

Criminality is not good, not for the country and not for you and I personally. We probably all agree on that. But real, deeply felt agreement is not reached until we personally feel the effects of criminal activities on our lives. We have a cottage twenty or thirty metres from

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Who Owns Whom

The crow first came to visit us one fresh autumn morning. It has to be said though, that autumn is not that big a deal in the Bosveld. Very few trees shed their leaves and daytime temperatures drop by only a degree or two. We have less cloudy weather than

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Lonely is the Whistleblower

In August it will be two years since Babita Deokaran was gunned down outside her home. She was killed because she was in the process of telling the truth about the theft of public money in the Gauteng Department of Health. As acting Chief Financial Officer in the Department she

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Our Strange Society

We live today, and have always lived in a strange society. Morality, regarding racist discrimination, and morality, regarding the misappropriation of public funds, do not seem to be related. Those who have gained stature as fighters for freedom are sometimes remarkably free with the money of others. When a dozen

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