There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
POST-APARTHEID South Africa has produced some first-class heroes. Two of them are former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela and current Chief Justice Raymond Zondo. It was Madonsela’s work investigating the corruption of Jacob Zuma’s administration that […]
Rosemary Sullivan, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (London: William Collins, 2022) ANNE Frank, author of the famous diary about life in hiding in wartime Amsterdam, was arrested on 4 August 1944, […]
Christopher Clark, Clare: The Killing of a Gentle Activist (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2022) THERE is a myth that still circulates out there, one of legions about South Africa’s history: that the transition from apartheid to […]
APPARENTLY, earlier this year South Africa held a decennial national census. Well, so we thought. In tune with the times, I registered us online and identified our house on Google Maps. Then, in spite of […]
Karyn Maughan and Kirsten Pearson, Nuclear: Inside South Africa’s Secret Deal (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2022) ONE of several wives of the president tries to poison him at the behest of the CIA, but he is […]
Zikhona Valela, Now You Know How Mapetla Died: The Story of a Black Consciousness Martyr (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2022) IN the 1980s, Black Sash meetings began with a roll-call of those who had died in […]
AND now for something completely different as Monty Python impressed on us back in the late sixties. Indeed, I never imagined that I would ever write anything under this heading, but as John Maynard Keynes […]
Ismail Lagardien, Too White to be Coloured, Too Coloured to be Black: On the Search for Home and Meaning (Cape Town: Melinda Ferguson Books, 2022) MOST people tempted to write a memoir ask themselves: is […]
THE LATEST report from Reporters without Borders (RSF) provides encouraging reading for South Africans. Of 180 countries surveyed, we come in at 35; a tribute to the work of journalists and robust constitutional protection. But […]
BACK in the day, as they say, I was a busy and productive writer: letters to the editor and opinion pieces in the newspaper, articles in journals and chapters in books, and a couple of […]