There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
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 […]
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; […]
EVERY year schoolteachers collect information on children by race and activity. Some bureaucrat somewhere could presumably tell you the number of coloured chess players, African cricketers, Indian choristers and white dancers in our schools. If […]
RECENTLY, a number of letters from staff and students of the University of KwaZulu-Natal have appeared in The Witness. At one stage their common, and most notable, characteristic was that their authors chose to remain anonymous, or […]
THE issue of street and building renaming in Pietermaritzburg has returned to the fore of public debate rather more rapidly than many would have expected or desired. Judging from the letters columns of The Witness […]
‘THERE is no country in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality’. These were the words of Alexis […]
‘AMONG people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist’: so wrote the political philosopher Edmund Burke in 1777. In the dying days of the white Parliament in the early nineties, the editor of the Mail & Guardian, Phillip […]
WE live in an age of overworked phrases. For a long while we were exhorted to level those uneven playing fields. Then the rainbow nation made its promising debut, only to be undermined by nepotism and […]
IN a cleverly constructed and astute piece of writing (Weekend Witness, 26 May 2007), Edward Griffiths examined the controversy over Luke Watson’s engineered selection for the Springbok rugby squad. He looked at the subsequent furore […]
THIS month (November 2009) the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is scheduled to release its verdict on the question of Caster Semenya’s eligibility to compete as a female athlete. It’s a sensitive, although not unique, issue, […]