Russian roulette
READING Peter Fabricius’s ‘Russian roulette’ (DM 168, 8 April 2023) one is struck by the parallels between South Africa’s growing closeness to Russia and Brexit. Both are based on mythology about the past and a […]
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The death of Albert Luthuli
NUMEROUS activists died as a result of the brutality and dirty tricks of the apartheid state; many in circumstances yet to be fully investigated. But the death of Albert Luthuli is unlikely to be one […]
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Rolling insurrection
In his address to the nation on Friday 16 July, President Cyril Ramaphosa was blunt: recent public violence and looting had been ‘a deliberate, co-ordinated and well-planned attack on [South Africa’s] democracy … The constitutional […]
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Cancel the Olympics
THE POSTPONED 2020 Olympic Games are due to open on 23 July: they should be cancelled. Japan is currently in the middle of a fourth wave of Covid-19 infections and parts of the country including […]
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Futility of boots and guns in a pandemic
THERE’S an old saying, of unknown origin but popularised by Mark Twain: ‘There are lies, damn lies … and statistics’. Each day in this world of pandemic we are bombarded by figures and graphs. They […]
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Militaristic response to crisis
SOUTH Africans woke up on Friday March 27 to the grim realisation that they are again living in a police state. A nondescript government whose norm is irrationality has chosen a threatening, militaristic response rather […]
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Blame lies with an authoritarian China
FAMINES, according to the renowned economist Amartya Sen, do not happen in functioning democracies. Nor do epidemics. There has been no better illustration of this than the Covid-19 pandemic that could become a turning point […]
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A day of infamy, sadness and shame
FRIDAY, January 31, 2020 will be recorded in British history as a day of infamy, sadness and shame. Brexit represents the triumph of English populist nationalism with its toxic baggage of xenophobia, philistinism, ignorance, nostalgia, […]
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Obscene language in cricket
HERSCHELLE Gibbs and Kevin Pietersen shrug off Joss Buttler’s expletive-laden rant at Vernon Philander in the recent Cape Town test as typical of what ‘happens on the field most of the time’ (Witness, January 9). […]
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Broadcasting meltdown
CHICKENS are at last coming home to roost for South African Airways. Business rescue basically means it will survive in some form in private hands, or simply disappear into liquidation. Either way it will be […]