There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
DURING November 2003 the Anglican Diocese of Natal marked its 150th anniversary. Inevitably many of the celebrations focused on its first bishop, John William Colenso (1818−1883), who lived at the Ekukhanyeni mission just outside Pietermaritzburg […]
EDENDALE municipality has never existed, but it should have done. James Allison, the dissident Wesleyan missionary, arrived in Natal from Swaziland in 1847 with a destitute refugee community of 400 that had originated in Transorangia and settled […]
‘AWAKING on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’ This is Sol Plaatjie’s memorable verdict on the Natives […]
THREE trucks left Pietermaritzburg in mid-June 1955 en route to the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg. Some of their passengers were from the Indian community and they lacked the required permits to travel to the […]
THE ANC has persistently grumbled about the media and threatened for some while to launch its own daily newspaper. Backed by Gupta family money, its long-delayed appearance last month was somewhat ironic given the name of […]
‘WE do not know how long comment in this or any other newspaper in South Africa will remain free.’ That was the grim opening to the main leader in the Natal Witness on 31 March 1960. The […]
HE might well have been the first black leader of a free South Africa. The apartheid government saw him as so formidable an opponent that at the end of his three-year sentence for incitement it passed the […]
AFTER Ruth First was released from detention she wrote presciently that ‘it was not the end … they would come again.’ Indeed they did, with a letter bomb delivered to the Centre for African Studies […]
ON 7 September 1966, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd died in the chamber of the House of Assembly from stab wounds. The adjective Verwoerdian subsequently entered the language as a description of extremism based on racial […]
POET, teacher, sports administrator, energetic campaigner for socio-economic justice and opponent of racism and globalisation – Dennis Brutus, who died in Durban on 26 December 2009 in his sleep after a fight against cancer, was […]