Friday, September 27, 2013

Yakhal'inkomo - Black Man's Cry

Some of my readers might remember my previous article on a painting called, "The Spear of Nation". In it I talk about the immature reaction from the ruling ANC party and its leadership to The Spear of the Nation. I also explain how the incident was blown out of proportion and how an artist by the name Ayanda Mabula had already painted Zuma in the nude before Brett Murray.

Well it seems Ayanda Mabula is grabbing the head lines this time. A new painting of Jacob Zuma that was on display at the First National Bank Artfair.... has been pulled as it may offend ANC leadership.

(Before I go onto the topic of the painting I just would quickly like to address First National Bank here. Stop being cowards. This is not the first time that FNB has has cowered to the ANC but hopefully it will be the last. )

It seems whomever pulled the painting from public display has never heard of the Streisand effect. To show the world what FNB and Zuma are hiding here is, Yakhal'inkomo - Black Man's Cry.

Yakhal'inkomo - Black Man's Cry
Yakhal'inkomo - Black Man's Cry
The work, by artist Ayanda Mabulu titled Yakhal'inkomo - Black Man's Cry, was themed around the Marikana shootings in August last year.
The painting reportedly depicted a kneeling miner with horns on his head, metaphorically representing a dying bull.
He was being attacked by Zuma's dog, reportedly signifying the police. Zuma, who was dressed in a suit, stepped on another dying miner's head.
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles were also depicted, laughing at the spectacle. They were hosted by ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa.
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema was also depicted in his red beret, shocked by what he saw.
The dying miners were being killed by a matador who used the South African flag instead of a red cape to lure the miners to his sword.
I personally think Ayanda has outdone himself and this is an amazing, thought provoking art piece. I could understand how the ANC leadership could find the painting offensive but at the end of the day, they stand in public office and nothing they do is above criticism. 


Thursday, September 5, 2013

How not to design a website

Its not often I come across such an intense example of a badly designed website, but I thought I would show my readers how NOT to make a website.

Recently I was looking into learning some Zulu and I came across the following website:

http://www.isizulu.net/

Which had the following message:
Google Chrome not welcome
isiZulu.net disapproves of Google because their "services" are designed to trample on privacy and monopolize the web.
Please choose a different browser vendor.
_nomap
Now to those of us in this IT industry know how silly this is. Cutting off such a huge part of your audience just shows how little you care about the people visiting your website.

The author of this website has decided to reject one of the worlds most popular browsers because he has ideological differences with the company that creates the browser. This would be understandable, however its pretty clear that same web designer runs a Microsoft PC.... who are well known to be a hundred times worse than Google in dodgy business practices. 

The hypocrisy from this web designer is mind blowing. The business practice is terrible. To add to the hypocrisy, the author of the website does not stop Google for indexing his website. So he is happy to get traffic from Google, but not happy if you use Google Chrome. That is just so dodgy.

Well because I was blocked from accessing isizulu.net I ended up purchasing products from another website featuring a more tolerant African language website. Xhosa. For those of you who would like to learn an African language I would recommend going to: http://www.learnxhosa.com/


Learn to speak Xhosa like a pro with the guys at http://www.learnxhosa.com All browsers welcome :) No double standards.

Turns out the confused author of the website is : Carsten Gaebler

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Warning. Scam store

This is just a warning to anyone who wishes use the following website:

http://standardstores.wozaonline.co.za/

They are a scam store and we have laid criminal charges against them for fraud. Please be careful about this fake "online store".