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But there is music playing in the background. That music is classical music. This is the music of the medieval period, past through the Renaissance era, beyond the common period, the 20th century, and right up to the present postmodern period.It is...

But occasionally, a word or expression will transcend mere fashion and preference and have character, a zeitgeist for the year we are in. Enter the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the world’s most authoritative English language dictionary, and its...

Try as I might, I have never managed to explain his emotional turmoil.But I think I now have a working hypothesis for it. Caution: it is not based on any professional knowledge or expertise. Rather, it is a caricature that arises out of my own...

They then must have concluded that to achieve that goal the city would require many things including multiple traffic lanes and public artworks. So they started getting them. Now Gaborone has several traffic intersections, fewer traffic circles,...

Socrates (470 BC - 399 BC), the founder of Western philosophy, its first martyr, and the first public intellectual, said that philosophy is a task of examining and investigating things, and to be critical about concepts that underlay everything....

Being spring in our country, confident people will start to bare their flesh or at least flash it. Being the last springtime before our country's general elections, politicians will start to ‘speechify’ in earnest.In both instances, their...

Again, to them, it is an area with extremes in both landscape and weather. It is a very high plateau of hamlets, villages, townships and ports of entry, built on land that has an average height of 1,000 meters above sea level.Measuring 2.5 million...

Because they know it: a Southern African stage performer will hold an audience enthralled as he or she breathes life and gives substance and emotion to forms of art; as if he or she is merely going through a routine; an East African athlete will...

It was the end of the first thirty years of my own experience with writing exclusively by hand and in pencil. (Context: The earliest allusion to what today we call a pencil was made in the 1600s.)I began another indefinite period of pencil...

As the progenitors of the term ‘hero’, the ancient Greeks admired and honored their heroes so much that they worshiped them as if they too were their gods. But heroes have lived before and after ancient Greek times. Even now, they live in our...

Anyhow one considers it, bread is the most mentioned or consumed foodstuff in almost every major faith. At times bread is shared as a symbol of fellowship and collective worship.At other times, bread’s base, wheat, is a metaphor for salvation and...

It turns out that there must be a minimum content of tastefulness before we conclude that something is beautiful. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Despite our differences in preferences, at art fairs, fashion shows, design shows, etc, we...

Like Dimpho, that individual would be born into a place inhabited on the one side by indigenous people, ignored and marginalised, in the middle, tribal people constituting some portion of the emerging elite and on the other side, settler communities,...

It was late afternoon and the best time to eat lightly. Ahead of me was a young woman, say in her mid-30s, elegantly dressed and with a pair of boisterous school going children, in identical clothes, likely twin boys. She could have been their mother...

For some, it may even be the time they start to dread the increase in their age (and ours too) which is bound to happen sooner or later! To counteract this propensity to descend into self-flagellation, I ask that this year, at its beginning, we...