Category: Multiculturalism

At the weekend it was my parents’ wedding anniversary. They got married in Dar es Salaam and one of the distinguishing features of their wedding was the hockey stick “guard of honour” that their friends created for them outside the church after the service (my Mum played hockey for Tanzania). The family capability and Goan cultural propensity to excel at sport (take […]

Multiculturalism has acquired a quality akin to spectacle. The metaphor that has displaced the melting pot is the salad. A salad consists of many ingredients, is colorful and beautiful, and it is to be consumed by someone. Who consumes multiculturalism is a question begging to be asked. Angela Y. Davis (1996, p. 45) WOMAD main […]

I was honoured to be invited by the African Community Forum Incorporated to attend and speak at an event on March 10th 2012 to celebrate International Women’s Day. I have written elsewhere about my links with East Africa. Briefly, I was born in Tabora Tanzania and lived in Nairobi, Kenya until the age of ten, when my […]

My response to a piece by Garth George (August 5th 2010) where he argues that [we] “have become unthinking victims of the doctrine of multiculturalism, in all its politically correct dissimulation and deception”. There are some good reasons for the rise in identity politics among minority groups, dismissed by Garth George as a “culture of victimhood. The […]

First published by: Australian Network for Promotion, Prevention and Early Intervention for Mental Health (Auseinet) – www.auseinet.com/journal and then republished in Mindnet Issue 11 – Spring 2007 Abstract Migrants and refugees make up an increasingly significant number of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s population with one in five New Zealanders being born in another country compared with one […]

Editorial published in Kai Tiaki: Nursing New Zealand 13.4 (May 2007): p2(1). American feminist psychologist and theorist Carol Gilligan once said that without voice there cannot be relationship, and without relationship there cannot be voice. (1) How do we have relationships with people who are different from us? How do we and the other person […]

Published in (2007) Asian Magazine, 4. I came across a wonderful definition of health by Jesse Williams in 1928 the other day in a book that I was reading. Williams defines health as being “the optimal condition of being that allows for the ultimate engagement of life.” To me this is what being healthy is […]

Plenary presentation at the New Zealand Diversity Forum, August 22, 2006. Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington. Thank you for inviting me to speak at this plenary session of the Diversity Forum. I’ve been asked to talk about my world, diversity and New Zealand from an ‘ethnic’1 point of view. The theme of my talk is to […]

Background paper for the Asia:NZ Foundation’s Kiwi India Seminar Series. Auckland and Wellington, October 2004 The title of this paper is drawn from a line in a Glenn Colquhoun poem. He draws inspiration from a poem by Allen Curnow, himself inspired by the site of a skeleton of a long extinct Moa in a museum. […]

DeSouza, R. (2004). Motherhood, migration and methodology: Giving voice to the “other”. The Qualitative Report, 9(3), 463-482. This paper discusses the need for multi-cultural methodologies that develop knowledge about the maternity experience of migrant women and that are attuned to women’s maternity-related requirements under multi-cultural conditions. Little is known about the transition to parenthood for […]