Persistent urban legend
EVERY Monday morning in the grounds of our local Anglican church modest food parcels are handed out. This began at a garden gate during the pandemic to help people who had lost jobs and resorted […]
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=Social media: a world of hatred and fakery
FOR the last few years of my formal working life, I was employed in the newsroom of a medium-size, well-established paper. It was a happy experience in a non-hierarchic, team-orientated environment and a relief after […]
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=Pissing in, or pissing out
THE rather crude image of a political tent with one’s adversaries outside pissing in, or alternatively inside pissing out, is attributed to US President Lyndon Johnson. In South Africa, following the 29 May elections the […]
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=D-Day eighty years on
‘THE constant rolling of the vessel coupled with my intense occupation in the wheelhouse with the screen of the Gee machine soon brought me to the extremes of sea-sickness. I felt absolutely dreadful and was […]
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=Showing the middle finger to democracy in South Africa
DENIALISM is an understandable human reaction – and a dangerous one. Those with faith in democracy tend to employ it when faced with populist threats from right and left: ‘they don’t really mean it’; ‘our […]
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=An Orwellian South Africa?
LIKE Kafka, George Orwell (Eric Blair) left his eponymous mark on history; plus anticipation of a particular forthcoming year. It’s now forty years since 1984, which turned out not to embody the dystopic future Blair […]
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=South Africa’s upcoming elections
MUCH is being made of the fact that a large number of the world’s nations will be holding general elections this year. Some will of course be a farce: Vladimir Putin will be reaffirmed as […]
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=Moscow on the veld
WE may never know exactly how Alexei Navalny died. One possibility put forward by someone familiar with such matters is that he was forced to stay out in sub-zero temperatures and then punched in the […]
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=Death and hypocrisy
UNBRIDLED adulation: that seems to be the default reaction at the passing of any prominent figure closely associated with the ANC. We’ve seen it again recently with the death of Mbongeni Ngema in a head-on […]
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=The universal suppression of women’s rights: Womandla!
IT’S been a grim year. Extremism and fundamentalism have taken a tighter grip on the planet; the conflict in Palestine being yet another instance in which the forces of reason and moderation have been sidelined. […]