45. Mandela: the long walk ends
THE long walk of Nelson Mandela has become something of a cliché. But it is hard to find a more suitable metaphor for a life that moved from herding cattle in Tembuland to the world’s most prominent […]
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46. It’s all in the label
SHOOTING THE MESSENGER, the bearer of unwelcome tidings, is a well-known national failing. In South Africa we have a bad habit of attaching labels to people and ideas and using them as a substitute for […]
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47. Political opposition: chihuahua or watchdog?
WITH a third resounding general election victory under the ANC’s belt and competitors falling by the wayside, it has become fashionable to argue that opposition in the traditional parliamentary sense is no longer necessary in […]
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48. Undermining the prospect of the rainbow nation
THE historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 1900s the ‘short’ twentieth century. It began, he argues, with the start of the Great War in 1914 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990; […]
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49. The re-racialisation of South African society
EVERY year schoolteachers collect information on children by race and activity. Some bureaucrat somewhere could presumably tell you the number of coloured chess players, African cricketers, Indian choristers and white dancers in our schools. If […]
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50. Fear and self-censorship: enemies of academic freedom
RECENTLY, a number of letters from staff and students of the University of KwaZulu-Natal have appeared in The Witness. At one stage their common, and most notable, characteristic was that their authors chose to remain anonymous, or […]
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51. Street renaming and airbrushing of history
THE issue of street and building renaming in Pietermaritzburg has returned to the fore of public debate rather more rapidly than many would have expected or desired. Judging from the letters columns of The Witness […]
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52. Legalism, bureaucracy and poor governance
‘THERE is no country in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality’. These were the words of Alexis […]
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53. Corruption: a betrayal of trust
‘AMONG people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist’: so wrote the political philosopher Edmund Burke in 1777. In the dying days of the white Parliament in the early nineties, the editor of the Mail & Guardian, Phillip […]
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54. Leaders, national institutions and moral decline
WE live in an age of overworked phrases. For a long while we were exhorted to level those uneven playing fields. Then the rainbow nation made its promising debut, only to be undermined by nepotism and […]