There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
HE might well have been the first black leader of a free South Africa. The apartheid government saw him as so formidable an opponent that at the end of his three-year sentence for incitement it passed the […]
AFTER Ruth First was released from detention she wrote presciently that ‘it was not the end … they would come again.’ Indeed they did, with a letter bomb delivered to the Centre for African Studies […]
ON 7 September 1966, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd died in the chamber of the House of Assembly from stab wounds. The adjective Verwoerdian subsequently entered the language as a description of extremism based on racial […]
POET, teacher, sports administrator, energetic campaigner for socio-economic justice and opponent of racism and globalisation – Dennis Brutus, who died in Durban on 26 December 2009 in his sleep after a fight against cancer, was […]
WHEN Basil Lewis d’Oliveira was named in 2000 as one of South Africa’s ten cricketers of the century, astonishingly it was the first time he had walked onto the field at Newlands. That one step […]
ENOUGH has been said about the SABC’s ill-starred attempt to identify by public acclaim one hundred great South Africans. But perhaps the public now has a greater understanding of the chasm between greatness on the one hand; […]
NINETEEN streets were renamed in Pietermaritzburg a few years ago and three of them commemorate members of the Liberal Party (LP): Selby Msimang, Peter Brown and Alan Paton. It’s a surprising record for adherents of a […]
IT all began with a march of 2 000 workers from Coronation Brick and Tile to a nearby football field. In the van was a man with a red flag. This was not the start of […]
PERHAPS the most significant observation on the recently commemorated thirtieth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising is the fact that few people under the age of 40 have a clear memory of the circumstances that brought […]
A street has been named after him in Durban, but there are pathetically few memorials to Bantu Stephen Biko, a highly significant political thinker but neglected figure of modern South African history. Seriously assaulted by Port […]