There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
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 […]
PREDICTABLY an eleventh-hour trade deal was reached to seal the Brexit process triggered by the 2016 referendum in which a majority of self-pitying, self-harming British voters turned their backs on the most constructive development in […]
IN the early hours of a winter’s morning, when the air is cold and still, you can hear the traffic from the N3, the Johannesburg to Durban highway, from our house; mainly trucks changing gear […]
AT last there was some good news for those of us who regard ourselves as social and liberal democrats. The decisive defeat of Donald Trump is a signal to right-wing populists the world over that […]