There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
ON Sunday 20 December last year, a telling two-part cameo played itself out in Pietermaritzburg. Residents of Northdale gathered at a primary sub-station that had exploded the previous Thursday leaving hundreds without electricity in an […]
FIFTY years ago, Richards Bay on the Zululand coast was hardly more than a spot for recreational fishing. Today it is the site of South Africa’s deepest harbour and main bulk port, shifting 80 million […]
FEW people will recognise the title Inqaba Yabasebenzi. Nor did many back in November 1987 when Inkatha, as the partial price of participation in peace talks in the growing Natal civil war, demanded that the […]
NOTHING appears to separate the worlds of Cyril Ramaphosa and Jacob Zuma more obviously than their attitudes towards the Zondo Commission into State Capture. Ramaphosa turned up for two apparently co-operative rounds; Zuma when he […]
RECENTLY, on 6 September, yet another apartheid functionary took with him to the grave secrets of the past without being put through a conclusive truth process. The dead man was João Rodrigues, the last surviving […]
THIRTY years after the fall of apartheid and Cricket South Africa (CSA) is involved in protracted hearings about social justice and nation building; in essence a truth commission to look at what has happened to […]
TUESDAY 1 June was an unusually bleak winter’s day in Pietermaritzburg after an overnight thunderstorm that lingered on into the morning together with Eskom power outages. It became even more remarkable in the university suburb […]
ON Friday 8 July, just over a day after Jacob Zuma was jailed, a distressed truck driver phoned SAFM radio to say that he was being attacked on the N3, southern Africa’s main economic highway […]
IT seems that the delayed 2020 Olympic Games will go ahead in July in spite of the opposition of a large number of Japanese. Their medical infrastructure is under considerable strain, parts of their country […]
BACK in the mid-1980s, when the anti-apartheid struggle was at a height, a group of Pietermaritzburg youngsters set up a group called Forward Youth. It had a socialist agenda and lived up to it by […]