Don't Shoot The Messenger

The great global slowdown imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing a slower pace of life on most of us, whether we like it or not. There’s something about hitting the brakes for this amount of time that can feel deeply anxiety-inducing - so we thought we’d use this moment to explore the benefits of taking it nice and slow.
In this week’s episode, we’re investigating the virtues of slowness: learning about the secrets of the world’s slowest mammals, exploring the delights of the Slow Food Movement, and hearing how the annual month of Ramadan brings a moment of calm and reflection to Muslim lives.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger is produced by Haji Mohamed Dawjee, presented by Rebecca Davis, edited by Tevya Turok Shapiro, with original theme music by Bernard Kotze and additional support from Kathryn Kotze.
Special thanks to Muhammad Dawjee for providing this week’s episode with original music from his soon to be released EP: Otherness.
Featured tracks in order of play:
Doublespeak
Neither
Dialect
Additional audio:
This American Life -
Additional reading:
All-Day Venison, a slow-food recipe by Tony Jackman

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/

In late April, Cuba sent 217 healthcare workers to South Africa to help fight Covid-19. A tremendous humanitarian gesture involving heroic doctors? Perhaps. But the deployment looks likely to cost the South African government almost half a billion rand - at a time when South Africa has its own doctors and nurses sitting unemployed. What’s really going on?
Cuba has been lending its doctors to other countries since the 1960s as a gesture of international solidarity, and those doctors have won praise for their work in some of the toughest public health contexts on record.
But as the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Mark Keller explains in this episode, from the 2000s onwards the Cuban medical missions began to serve another purpose too: to make some much-needed cash for the Cuban government.
With the South African state reportedly being charged over R450 million for the Cuban medical mission sent to South Africa to fight Covid-19, the question is whether these doctors are even really needed - and why South Africa would be willing to pay such a high price.
With Mark Keller, we unpack the history of Cuba’s medical missions and why they have on occasion been likened to “human trafficking”. We also hear from advocate Rene Govender, who for years has been fighting an uphill battle to win South African doctors who trained overseas the right to practice medicine here. Unlike with the Cuban doctors, nobody is rolling out the red carpet for these unemployed local medics.
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.
Additional Credits:
Supporting audio provided by: Al-Jazeera, University of Miami, Redfish Stream and News24.
Guantanamera by Playing for Change. Is the deployment of Cuban doctors to SA justified?

On this week’s show, we’re thinking about Tomorrowland: the fascinating connections between pandemics and pop culture. The Bubonic Plague struck Europe more than 650 years ago, yet its impact is still felt in art today. As we face the greatest social disruption since World War II, with COVD-19 killing hundreds of thousands of people globally, we’re asking: What mark will this moment leave on art, fashion, film and literature? To help us explore ‘Tomorrowland’, we’re talking to experts in fashion, film – and to South African author Lauren Beukes, who just spent five years immersed in a fictional pandemic, only to emerge into a real one.
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.