From The Thornveld Sharp Thoughts – Page 5 – Welcome
  • A rolling insurrection in South Africa?

    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 […]

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  • The ongoing saga of Mzala’s ‘Chief with a Double Agenda’

    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 […]

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  • ANC political culture and the South African crisis

    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 […]

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  • Filling in the potholes of apartheid history

    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 […]

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  • Cricket South Africa and its truth commission

    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 […]

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  • Crime, punishment and policing in South Africa

    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 […]

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  • Insurrection in South Africa: from disaster to calamity

    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 […]

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  • Abolish the Olympics

    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 […]

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  • Adam Habib, SOAS and the speech police

    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 […]

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  • Apartheid’s not dead yet

    WHEN still head of the library on the local university campus, I was required by the institution’s equity commissar to classify all my colleagues (over 50 of them) by race. As a lifelong advocate of […]

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