The Big Chill: What lockdown can teach us about the benefits of slowness

05/17/20 • 21 min

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

Previous Episode

The White Coat Army: Why is South Africa paying Cuba for doctors?

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?

Next Episode

Inside the bizarre world of the Zumas’ new YouTube series

“Zooming With The Zumas” is the real title of a real YouTube series offering the public a front-row seat to intimate video chats between former South African president Jacob Zuma and his son Duduzane.
In this episode, we rope in Daily Maverick journalist Marianne Thamm to help unpack the perplexing world of Zooming with the Zumas: fact-checking some of the confounding claims made by the Zumas, analysing what it tells us about their undeniably curious family dynamics, and interrogating what on earth the point of this strange production could be.
Additional audio:
Zooming With The Zumas on YouTube
Additional reading:
Duduzane’s Dubai Lockdown Diary - Everything But The Lost Years, by Marianne Thamm
Parts Two and Three, in which the Zuma Dynasty finds itself a hapless victim of circumstance, by Marianne Thamm