CEO SleepOut: Trillion reasons to kick this poorface orgy to the kerb

You've heard of tone-deaf crackers dressing up in blackface. Now get ready for tone-deaf millionaires dressing up in poorface.

It’s time to brace yourself for South Africa’s annual masturbatory orgy of poverty porn: the wholly hideous CEO SleepOut.

“Poorface” is a term coined by British writer Jack Monroe after living in poverty and watching London’s elite experiment with being “poor for a day” to raise “awareness”, exclaiming at how hard it is to eat fresh fruit on a limited budget.

The organisers of this year’s event, however, don’t call it poorfacing. They call it a “movement”, like, I suppose, a bowel movement.

Certainly, it takes a very special kind of shit to imagine that it is a good idea to bid millions of rand to spend a night in Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, something that was on offer until Twitter found out about it and raised a stink.

At the time of writing is it unclear whether the Mandela cell event will go ahead, with Robben Island curators saying they didn’t know about the plan.

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