Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦

[Andre Vlok @vlok_andre]

The coercion, the blatant interference... all so obvious at this stage. The ambassador as second-hand car salesman

[Nicholas Dawes @NicDawes]

There is much fuel for this discussion in @amaBhungane's reporting over the last 18 months, which deserves a lot more attention, starting here https://t.co/fvgLPg5wC5

[United Nations @UN]

Congratulations to our colleague Navi Pillay on being awarded the 2026 #NobelPeacePrize!

Her unwavering commitment to justice, human rights and accountability is a source of inspiration for the United Nations and millions of people around the world.

[Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦 @CharmeelaB]

@joelpollak This is ignorant and false 🤷🏽‍♀️

[Agnes Callamard @AgnesCallamard]

Amazing moment.

Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize ! https://t.co/HL3r1PJzLO

We are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize.

We are all so thrilled!

This is her first reactions upon hearing the news:

[Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦 @CharmeelaB]

@RobynCurnow Fantastic ✊🏾

[Victor Nwaneri🇿🇦🇺🇸🇧🇯🇳🇬 @vnwaneri]

@AdvBMkhwebane @Fiswa_ Busi you are wrong. Nowhere in the citizenship act does it use the word foreigner. A foreigner may not necessarily be an alien and therefore a foreigners children can be a South African by birth. Please do better! You are an officer of the court

[Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦 @CharmeelaB]

@nthiggs @RobynPorteous Same

[Andre Vlok @vlok_andre]

How squeamish we are in this new geopolitical kitchen. How easily some of us choose sides against our own country.

Last year, when Ebrahim Rasool got expelled because he said the Trump administration was mobilizing white victimhood (a decision I endorsed), some of you were quick to point out the correct place and decorum of am ambassador.

Now, many of those same voices have changed to defending the ambassador, all based on "asks" that should at best be debated. See the pattern?

Speaking of patterns, have a look at this list of ambassadors openly criticizing their host countries, in breach of diplomatic protocols, and against the strong objection from those countries:

L. Brent Bozell III — United States ambassador to South Africa
Charles Kushner — United States ambassador to France
Tom Rose — United States ambassador to Poland
Pete Hoekstra — United States ambassador to Canada
Brandon Judd — United States ambassador to Chile
Bill White — United States ambassador to Belgium

See the pattern?

For many of you, your breathless indignation and your stated concern for the welfare of the country is little more than a thinly veiled, and terribly transparent, mask to hide your prejudice and your selfishness. If you want to improve the country, and by God we need so much if that, do it from this side of the fence.

If you are sincere about this, as most of you are, stop basing your decisions on fear and sophisticated hate campaigns that use you as gun fodder. Fight for your country without being gullible, without oversimplification, without doing further damage

[Pieter Du Toit @PieterDuToit]

@ferialhaffajee That’s been the game from the start. They do not subscribe to the 1994 settlement, and are using a weakened state and government to attain that which they could not in the 1990s. They want to see the breaking up of the unitary state. And have found a sponsor in the US.

[Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦 @CharmeelaB]

@green_pippa Yes. A genocide.

[Mteto Nyati @mteton]

MaXhosa Africa did not arrive in Paris by accident.

Yesterday the brand became the first South African house to stage a full official runway show on the Paris Fashion Week calendar. Many will call it overnight success. That reading misses the point.

This is the result of years of disciplined work. A clear identity. An intentional geographic expansion strategy. Repeated applications. Presentations before the runway. Factories in Johannesburg and East London. Craft that is unapologetically African and designed, from the start, to travel.

That is what some strategists call glocal. Stay rooted in what your geography uniquely offers, then take it to the world with excellence.

The collection title, Izihlwele Zivumile - the ancestors have approved - is a reminder that breakthroughs rest on more than one generation’s effort. They rest on inheritance, persistence, and the decision to keep doing the work when no one is watching.

MaXhosa Africa challenges the rest of us. Move from protest and complaint to finding what we uniquely have, and then taking the right actions to make those ideas real. That is how ownership patterns in the economy change. We have to make things happen ourselves.

Stick to your knitting. Do it at a standard the world cannot ignore.

Congratulations to Laduma Ngxokolo, Lihle Ngxokolo Nqini, and the entire MaXhosa Africa team. Africa is not asking for a seat. It is taking one.

[Omid Scobie @scobie]

Newsroom careers are dead. In its place: personal brands, visibility and a system that can reward exaggeration, self-promotion and unethical decisions.

This week's OFF SCRIPT: what happens when journalists have to sell themselves as well as the story
https://t.co/uFnq464PDD

[anna 🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦 @annaswan001]

@solidariteit From the farmers

[Sean Jacobs @seanhjacobs]

This, by JM Coetzee, in @Equatormag, about an actual genocide in South Africa, is very good. https://t.co/T1XkizwKws

[Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦 @CharmeelaB]

@gilliangodsell @DameZibi Agree!

[Thuli Madonsela Foundation @ThumaFoundation]

Today closes #WomenWhoBuiltDemocracy.

Over twenty-eight days we published the story of a woman who built, defended or deepened South African democracy.

We began with Charlotte Maxeke, who opened the road forty-three years before 1956, and the twenty thousand women who stood in silence at the Union Buildings. We moved through what resistance actually cost. Albertina Sisulu, banned for eighteen years, the longest order ever imposed on any South African. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, four hundred and ninety-one days detained. Ruth First, killed for finding things out and writing them down.

Then we asked which institutions women built once the fighting was over. Frene Ginwala designed how a democratic Parliament would work. Yvonne Mokgoro wrote ubuntu into the Constitutional Court's first judgment. Navi Pillay helped redefine genocide in international law.

Today we bring the final two conversations together.

First, are we defending what those women built? Then, the work still happening right now. Emma Mashinini organised a sector nobody else thought worth organising. Lydia Kompe mobilised five hundred rural women's groups. Ward committees, advice offices, women whose names most of us do not yet know.

This session has no fixed panel. If you have lived some part of what this month has described, we want to hear from you. You do not need to be an expert.

Sunday 30 August
14:00 to 15:30 SAST
Live on Zoom
https://t.co/8BSgl9WxAW
Meeting ID 584 582 9073
Passcode d5D1Ty

Twenty-five women. One list that is still open. Come help us close this the right way.

#WomenWhoBuiltDemocracy #WomensMonth2026 #RememberHerName #ThePeoplesPower

[Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦 @CharmeelaB]

@QaanitahHunter Where is this stuff coming from?

[Charmeela Bhagowat🇿🇦 @CharmeelaB]

@gilliangodsell Good morning Gillian. 🌷

[Mbhazima Shilowa @Enghumbhini]

Where does this thing of no ideology is needed at local government only delivery comes from? Where you build a road, ensure economic development or money for communities is itself ideological