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Recent Posts

  • The Truth about Cape Slavery

    Patric Tariq Mellet, The Truth about Cape Slavery: The Foundations of Colonial South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) CAPE slavery has often been described as relatively benign, a sideshow to the main drama of South […]

     
  • Persistent urban legend

    EVERY Monday morning in the grounds of our local Anglican church modest food parcels are handed out. This began at a garden gate during the pandemic to help people who had lost jobs and resorted […]

     
  • Hunting with the Hawks: Untold Stories from the Elite South African Crime-Fighting Unit

    Graham Coetzer, Hunting with the Hawks: Untold Stories from the Elite South African Crime-Fighting Unit (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) THE FAMED Scorpions, the Directorate of Special Operations which fell under the NPA and combined investigative […]

     
  • Hunting the Seven: How the Gugulethu Seven Assassins were Exposed

    Beverley Roos-Muller, Hunting the Seven: How the Gugulethu Seven Assassins were Exposed (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) THE ATTEMPTED ambush of a police van in Gugulethu on 3 March 1986 resulted in the deaths of seven […]

     
  • Social media: a world of hatred and fakery

    FOR the last few years of my formal working life, I was employed in the newsroom of a medium-size, well-established paper. It was a happy experience in a non-hierarchic, team-orientated environment and a relief after […]

     
  • High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler

    Roy Isacowitz and Jeremy Gordin, High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) CHARM, charisma and confidence are worth more than any academic qualification; but they can spill over […]

     
  • Botha, Smuts and the First World War

    Antonio Garcia and Ian van der Waag, Botha, Smuts and the First World War (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) MEMORIALS to generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts have not fared well in recent years; removed or […]

     
  • Pissing in, or pissing out

    THE rather crude image of a political tent with one’s adversaries outside pissing in, or alternatively inside pissing out, is attributed to US President Lyndon Johnson. In South Africa, following the 29 May elections the […]

     
  • Crash and Burn: A CEO’s Crazy Adventures in the SA Airline Industry

    Glenn Orsmond, Crash and Burn: A CEO’s Crazy Adventures in the SA Airline Industry (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) FOR nearly thirty years I was regularly told that higher education needed to follow a business model. […]

     
  • D-Day eighty years on

    ‘THE constant rolling of the vessel coupled with my intense occupation in the wheelhouse with the screen of the Gee machine soon brought me to the extremes of sea-sickness. I felt absolutely dreadful and was […]