There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Xolisa Guzula and Athambile Masola, Together Apart: The Story of Living in Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2024) No-one under 35 can have a first-hand understanding of life in apartheid South Africa. To many of today’s children […]
WHEN we discuss the strengths and virtues of liberal democracy, that political philosophy now under siege in the United States, it is the permissive freedoms that spring to mind such as rule of and equality […]
Pieter du Toit, The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) STATE capture nearly bankrupted South Africa. Its mechanics and perpetrators were well documented by investigative journalists and then […]
IN the three-part drama Shooting the Past by the writer and director Stephen Poliakoff, the largely eccentric staff of a London photo archive of millions of items try to save their collection from destruction. The […]
Seán Morrow, The Bams of Grasslands Farm: A Family History (Johannesburg: Staging Post, 2024) WHAT might the course of South African history have been had the Christian African middle class of the nineteenth century been […]
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World (London: Allen Lane, 2024) DICTATORS and dictatorship are hardly new: they provided much of the darkness of the twentieth century, often in extreme […]
THE AMERICAN people have not only elected a misogynist and convicted criminal as their 47th president, but a traitor. There can be no other conclusion. This is a man who incited violent insurrection by persistent […]
Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel (London: Penguin Viking, 2024) GEORGE Smiley, the anti-hero agent, appears in nine novels written by John le Carré who died in 2020. Smiley has a vast […]
ANGER stalks the world and seems evenly spread among the generations, although particularly prevalent among men as the crisis of masculinity grows. One would expect in this situation, whatever its genesis, that young charismatic leaders […]
RHODA Kadalie was a well-known radical, anti-apartheid South African feminist who worked as an academic and journalist. Yet, for the last few years of her life she moved to the USA and became a Donald […]