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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Escape from Lubumbashi: A Refugee’s Journey on Foot to Reunite her Family
Estelle Neethling, Escape from Lubumbashi: A Refugee’s Journey on Foot to Reunite her Family (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2021) PROLONGED conflict in the DRC produced Africa’s Great War. Casualties are hard to pin down, or comprehend: […]
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These are not Gentle People: A True Story
Andrew Harding, These are not Gentle People: A True Story (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2020) AN OLD man is attacked on a farm near Parys in the northern Free State in January 2016 by two or […]
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Views on life in the continuing crisis: part two
WE’VE just passed 23 March, the day the first UK lockdown began in 2020. The charity Marie Curie named it a ‘Day of Reflection’, and encouraged a minute’s silence at noon and distanced candlelight vigils […]
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The Man Behind the Beard: Deneys Schreiner, a South African Liberal Life
Graham Dominy, The Man Behind the Beard: Deneys Schreiner, a South African Liberal Life (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2020) COURTESY of Covid-19 and lockdown of the UKZN Press, I collected my review copy of […]
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The Blackridge House: A Memoir
Julia Martin, The Blackridge House: A Memoir (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2019) AN OLD woman of 92 lies bedridden in a Cape Town nursing home watching squirrels and birds in the branches of a syringa tree. […]
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Women in Solitary: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid
Shanthini Naidoo, Women in Solitary: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2020) APARTHEID was based on complex legislation, increasingly distanced from the rule of law. Before the National Party regime resorted to […]
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Making Sense of Research
Keyan G. Tomaselli (ed.), Making Sense of Research (Pretoria: Van Schaik, 2018) THE ESSENTIAL purpose of universities is easy enough to define: training and practice in the acquisition, refinement and dissemination of new knowledge – […]
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The absent nation
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 […]