There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
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 […]
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 […]
IT’S a regular feature of a South African February: SONA, the State of the Nation address. This year’s Covid-19-flavoured edition was an improvement in some ways: no corpulent people dressed in red boiler suits disrupting […]
FOR many years Jacob Zuma, faced by allegations of corruption around the arms deal of the late 1990s and his later association with the Gupta family, demanded his day in court. Yet this was a […]