43. The Truth Commission: unfinished business
THE last few months have seen the deaths of two of the most notorious members of the security forces of the apartheid era: Lothar Neethling, head of the forensic unit of the South African police and […]
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44. Mandela, secular sainthood and rugby matches
THE protracted hospitalisation of Nelson Mandela is having an extraordinary effect on the nation. Given the stature of the man, we should perhaps not be surprised. But disturbing trends are evident. Take, for example, another […]
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The Testimony of Steve Biko and No Fears Expressed: Quotes from Steve Biko
Millard W. Arnold (ed.), The Testimony of Steve Biko and No Fears Expressed: Quotes from Steve Biko (Picador Africa) APARTHEID was a theatre of both fear and farce. Steve Biko, by then a banned person, […]
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A Legacy of Spies
John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies (Penguin Random House) IN the novel that first made John le Carré’s name, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alec Leamas and Elizabeth Gold are shot […]
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Just another commodity
CRICKET is governed not by rules, like other sport, but by laws. Famously, there are 42 of them and the law makers have managed to keep this number constant through various editions, including the latest […]
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The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and out of Prison
Jacques Pauw, The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and out of Prison (Tafelberg) HE became South Africa’s president in 2009 already deeply compromised by the arms deal. Subsequently Jacob Zuma has behaved like […]
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45. Mandela: the long walk ends
THE long walk of Nelson Mandela has become something of a cliché. But it is hard to find a more suitable metaphor for a life that moved from herding cattle in Tembuland to the world’s most prominent […]
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46. It’s all in the label
SHOOTING THE MESSENGER, the bearer of unwelcome tidings, is a well-known national failing. In South Africa we have a bad habit of attaching labels to people and ideas and using them as a substitute for […]
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47. Political opposition: chihuahua or watchdog?
WITH a third resounding general election victory under the ANC’s belt and competitors falling by the wayside, it has become fashionable to argue that opposition in the traditional parliamentary sense is no longer necessary in […]
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48. Undermining the prospect of the rainbow nation
THE historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 1900s the ‘short’ twentieth century. It began, he argues, with the start of the Great War in 1914 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990; […]