There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
BOOKS on South Africa’s recent history continue to roll off keyboards and printing presses, including a recent spate of memoirs and analyses of Mkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress […]
POST-TRUTH (or post-factual) politics is term of the year according to Oxford Dictionaries. Sceptics might question when politics was ever about truth while history shows that the ascent of every totalitarian ideology, right or left, […]
FIDEL Castro was the archetypal revolutionary − beard, military fatigues and cigar were glamorous left-wing symbols of the 1960s. At the age of thirteen he organised a strike amongst his father’s workers and during the […]
TRANSFORMATION has been without question one of South Africa’s most overworked words in the media and public discourse since national liberation. Like every word it has a precise dictionary definition, yet it is a frequent […]
IT is hard from the events of the last five months to avoid the conclusion that without a major change of direction, the United Kingdom is headed for political disintegration and economic decline. Although the […]
FLASHBACK twenty-seven years to September 1989: police had fired on demonstrators on the Durban campus of the University of Natal ahead of the (final) whites-only general election. Pietermaritzburg staff and students decided to march on […]
PRIME Minister Hendrik Verwoerd died in the chamber of the House of Assembly from four stab wounds to the neck and chest. His assailant was beaten up by National Party members of parliament while P.W. […]
TODAY, 38 years ago, Rick Turner was murdered in Bellair, Durban at the age of 36. His killer has never been identified, but it was without doubt someone (possibly a member of the right-wing Scorpio […]
IT was a blue-light convoy the like of which we had not seen before, though KwaZulu-Natal has a deserved reputation for them. First, there was a personnel-carrier with six soldiers in body armour and heavy […]
SOUTH African cartoonists are fond of portraying the national economy perched on the edge of a cliff. It’s an appropriate image, but there are other cliffs around, one of them involving our constitutional right to […]