Strange and amazing times
by Fred on 26/05/08 at 12:19 pm
3 comments
Xenophobia: Was interested to find out that most of visitors to our beautiful country were from our own continent. According to Eighty-20, out of the 779,094 tourists and visitors to South Africa in February 2008. 549,428 were from Africa. 69% of urban South Africans agree with the statement ‘Immigrants are a threat to jobs for South Africans, they should not be allowed into the country,’ and two thirds of South Africans agree with the statement ‘Most of the problems in South Africa are caused by illegal immigrants / foreigners.’
I think this is also interesting: The number of people the ANC brought back from exile at the end of apartheid was between 13,000 and 16,000.
What must the inhabitants of those countries be thinking now?
Twitter: After being fired up by Andrew’s brilliant post on Friday, I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter. As much as it can be a frustrating experience, the business case for using it is pretty solid (read Andrew’s post for more info).
This is the ‘big three’ for me:
1. Information gathering: I needed a prominent South African businessman’s contact details on Monday last week. I tweeted the request and got a response within 1 minute! Amazing.
2. Communication (fast!): this is the obvious one; you have an in-their-face channel right to a growing group of like-minded people. As an example, I announced the speakers for this month’s Heavy Chef Session** on Twitter, and within a few minutes 7 seats had been booked.
3. News: through following David Duarte, I just found out via one of his tweets that Angola is undergoing 25% annual growth. The good folk you follow on Twitter filter all the right stuff for you.
** Heavy Chef: There are a handful of seats left for this month’s session (entitled ‘Netreprenuers’), so drop us a line if you want to attend (it’s free). Click here for more information on the monthly sessions. Speakers are Eric Edelstein and Charl Norman.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
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John Joubert
May 29th, 2008
Nice post! I’ve been hearing so much about Twitter lately that I almost feel like it’s a must. I’m signing up as I write this!
Herman & Yvonne
May 31st, 2008
As Dutch in Robertson, Western Cape, South Africa (stunning country side, lots of things to do except wacky free wine tasting, etc.) we were confronted once with a kind of xenophobia: “First of all you are not an Afrikaner. Second you are not from Robertson. Thirdly you are not South African. The only plus you have is that you are white……”.
Very fortunate there are very nice people (majority) living in this area (including ‘white’ locals)and with a charming and honest hospitality. Unfortunately the (majority of the) minority is dominating.
But we can live with that. It’s part of Life over here.
Global Voices Online » South Africa: Bloggers need to do more than just write
May 31st, 2008
[...] Fred publishes statistics regarding foreigners in the country: Was interested to find out that most of visitors to our beautiful country were from our own continent. According to Eighty-20, out of the 779,094 tourists and visitors to South Africa in February 2008. 549,428 were from Africa. 69% of urban South Africans agree with the statement ‘Immigrants are a threat to jobs for South Africans, they should not be allowed into the country,’ and two thirds of South Africans agree with the statement ‘Most of the problems in South Africa are caused by illegal immigrants / foreigners.’ I think this is also interesting: The number of people the ANC brought back from exile at the end of apartheid was between 13,000 and 16,000. What must the inhabitants of those countries be thinking now? [...]