There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
ENOUGH has been said about the SABC’s ill-starred attempt to identify by public acclaim one hundred great South Africans. But perhaps the public now has a greater understanding of the chasm between greatness on the one hand; […]
NINETEEN streets were renamed in Pietermaritzburg a few years ago and three of them commemorate members of the Liberal Party (LP): Selby Msimang, Peter Brown and Alan Paton. It’s a surprising record for adherents of a […]
IT all began with a march of 2 000 workers from Coronation Brick and Tile to a nearby football field. In the van was a man with a red flag. This was not the start of […]
PERHAPS the most significant observation on the recently commemorated thirtieth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising is the fact that few people under the age of 40 have a clear memory of the circumstances that brought […]
A street has been named after him in Durban, but there are pathetically few memorials to Bantu Stephen Biko, a highly significant political thinker but neglected figure of modern South African history. Seriously assaulted by Port […]
THE recent deaths, within a few weeks of one another, of two prominent lawyers, both ex-Robben Island prisoners, focused rare and brief attention on the Unity Movement (UM, formerly the Non-European Unity Movement founded in […]
IN October 1973 Aurora Cricket Club took to the field as the first multi-ethnic team in modern times to play in a white league in South Africa. The events of that day, and the circumstances […]
‘I know it is difficult … but we’ve got to think more clearly than the state allows.’ This is how Peter Sacks in a poetic tribute published in 1986 remembered the teaching of Richard Turner. […]
ON 6 October 2013 doctor and volunteer trade unionist Neil Aggett would have celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Instead, half a lifetime ago, he died on 5 February 1982 at his own hand in a cell […]
‘UDF unites, apartheid divides’: around this ringing slogan the United Democratic Front was launched on 20 August 1983. The South African security state was at its most active, and turning to increasingly violent and illegal […]