There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
DENIALISM is an understandable human reaction – and a dangerous one. Those with faith in democracy tend to employ it when faced with populist threats from right and left: ‘they don’t really mean it’; ‘our […]
Philippe Denis, The First Black Dominican Sisters in Natal (1922‒39): At the Crossroads of Race and Gender (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2023) THE KEY event of this book is the rushed and slipshod transfer […]
LIKE Kafka, George Orwell (Eric Blair) left his eponymous mark on history; plus anticipation of a particular forthcoming year. It’s now forty years since 1984, which turned out not to embody the dystopic future Blair […]
Mark Shaw, Breaking the Bombers: How the Hunt for Pagad Created a Crack Police Unit (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2023) THE NEGOTIATED political settlement of the early 1990s opened up South Africa in more ways than […]
MUCH is being made of the fact that a large number of the world’s nations will be holding general elections this year. Some will of course be a farce: Vladimir Putin will be reaffirmed as […]
WE may never know exactly how Alexei Navalny died. One possibility put forward by someone familiar with such matters is that he was forced to stay out in sub-zero temperatures and then punched in the […]
Dan Mafora, Capture in the Court: In Defence of Judges and the Constitution (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2023) THIRTY years down the line from its first democratic elections, the political landscape of South Africa may best […]
UNBRIDLED adulation: that seems to be the default reaction at the passing of any prominent figure closely associated with the ANC. We’ve seen it again recently with the death of Mbongeni Ngema in a head-on […]
Evert Kleynhans and David Brock Katz, 20 Battles: Searching for a South African Way of War, 1913‒2013 (Johannesburg: Delta Books, 2023) THE PURPOSE of this book, written by military scientists and historians, is to identify […]
Marecia Damons and Daniel Steyn, The Thabo Bester Story: The Facebook Rapist, the Celebrity Doctor and the Escape from Cell 35 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2023) IT is tempting to regard this story as truth stranger […]