Crtve Development

He makes the ordinary impossible to look away from. Tatenda Chidora is this week's Hot on the Block - a photographer who has spent his career redefining what it means to photograph the African face. From Thebe Magugu to Nike, Adidas to Apple Music, his lens has been behind some of the most recognisable visual moments in South African culture. Swipe through to meet the man behind the work.

Childcare can make or break a woman's ability to show up. The guilt that comes with excelling professionally but falling short personally is something most mothers understand all too well. Women are told they need to be 100% in every area of their lives, all at once. That is not balance. That has never been balance.

Neo Mofokeng is an international civil servant at UN Women, spending her career making sure women and girls are in the rooms where decisions get made. The care economy is not abstract to her. It is the reality she navigates every single day, the same one millions of women across the continent are navigating quietly, without recognition, and without support.

That is exactly what this campaign exists to change. Care is not a personal problem to manage. It is a structural issue that needs a structural response.

Dr Katlego Selikane worked 32 hour shifts, led a mobile health clinic into underserved communities, and built an online community for mothers who had nowhere else to turn. And somewhere in all of that, she watched the system burn through the people trying to hold it together.

She has lived that. And she kept showing up anyway.

When the system doesn't care for its caregivers, it is not just the caregivers who lose. It is every patient who needed more than a diagnosis. Every mother who needed to feel less alone. Every community that deserved better.

If we truly believe care is capital, we have to start by protecting the people who give it.

You call her “aunty”. You call her “helper”. She is “part of the family”. Yet she doesn’t have a contract.⁠ Make that make sense🙃
⁠
Today is Workers’ Day, and for many domestic workers like our champion Desiree Mfeka, it’s not a day off.⁠
⁠
For over a decade, Desiree has managed homes, cared for other people’s families, and turned chaos into order. She is one of nearly a million domestic workers in this country, largely South African black women and migrant workers, who face two glaringly obvious realities: their economic contributions aren’t counted, and labour laws are still catching up.⁠
⁠
When we say “Care is capital” we’re not saying it for fun. Treating it that way means closing the gap between what’s promised and what is is lived. Pay domestic workers fairly, give them contracts, register them, and enforce the laws that exists
⁠
⁠