There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Mark SHAW, Hitmen for Hire: Exposing South Africa’s Underworld (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2017) WANT someone rubbed out? It could cost you as little as R10 000 in a society in which extreme violence is commonplace […]
IN the closing scene of George Orwell’s brilliant allegory of political revolution, Animal Farm, the workers eavesdrop on a meeting at which their masters, the pigs, are fraternising with the traditional enemy, human beings. As […]
IF you have ever watched what is arguably the BBC’s best-ever situation comedy, ‘Yes Minister’, you will recall the various facial expressions of Sir Humphrey Appleby (played by the Anglo-South African actor Nigel Hawthorne), the […]
THE censorship system of the apartheid era was complex, savagely comprehensive and unwieldy; but full of loopholes. Often it brought fresh meaning to the concept of the absurd: the 1950s customs embargo on Anna Sewell’s […]
WHICH would you prefer: to be jobless most of the time, but able to afford cheap Chinese-made sandals; or employed in a shoe factory that contributes to the economic and social stability of your local […]
THE year is still young, but even the most avid reader of South African news might be wilting. Racism; corruption; crime; crises in service delivery and sports administration; and mayhem on our roads hit the headlines with […]
IS recent South African history a saga of lost opportunities? Historians tend not to ask the perfectly natural question: what might have been? Perhaps it calls for too much speculation, but it is worth considering. Take World […]
IT is difficult to believe that liberated South Africa, fifteen years into its hard-earned democracy, is witness to stone-throwing township protestors facing police rubber bullets and teargas. This year there have been 24 major protests, […]
Hugh MACMILLAN, Oliver Tambo: A Jacana Pocket Biography (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2017) HAD it not been for the Treason Trial of 1956, Oliver Tambo would almost certainly have become an Anglican priest. He was close to […]