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; […]
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49. The re-racialisation of South African society
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 […]
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50. Fear and self-censorship: enemies of academic freedom
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 […]
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51. Street renaming and airbrushing of history
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 […]
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52. Legalism, bureaucracy and poor governance
‘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 […]
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53. Corruption: a betrayal of trust
‘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 […]
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54. Leaders, national institutions and moral decline
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 […]
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55. Sport, political agendas and racial quotas
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 […]
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56. Athletics South Africa: tragedy and farce
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, […]
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Hitmen for Hire: Exposing South Africa’s Underworld
Mark SHAW, Hitmen for Hire: Exposing South Africa’s Underworld (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2017) WANT someone rubbed out? It could cost you as little as R10 000 in a society in which extreme violence is commonplace […]