There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
BANG in the middle of his budget speech last week, Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan made an unexpected, coded remark. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is to be done?’ He was using the title of a book […]
THE next four years are going to be tough for those who have no affection for football or tolerance for the vuvuzela. With the latest round of the world head-butting, diving, and feigning injury championships having culminated […]
IN 1989, the non-racial South African Soccer Federation hosted its national tournament in Pietermaritzburg. One of the administrators present, from the Eastern Cape Football Board, was Danny Jordaan. From photographs in the tournament brochure he […]
FRIDAY, 13 June 1986: the day the State of Emergency was declared. The Weekly Mail carried on its front page a picture of grim-faced policemen, sjamboks at the ready, marching on Khotso House in Johannesburg. […]
IT’S become a a predictable part of the South African calendar. The strike season is with us again, one of those rituals that continues to set this country apart. Virtually everything about it appears to […]
PERHAPS not surprisingly, we are still haunted by the ghosts of apartheid. Some have faded into deserved obscurity. But the case of Wouter Basson is currently before the Health Professions Council, which is scrutinising his […]
THE garden of remembrance at Freedom Park in Pretoria, according to our government, ‘symbolises the final resting place of the fallen heroes and heroines of the conflicts which shaped the history of South Africa’. But the […]
BEFORE Christmas 2013 it was reported that bookshops were faced with such a demand for titles on Nelson Mandela they ran out of stock. This proved to be a trifle exaggerated, but clearly the millions […]
WHEN workers downed tools at Coronation Brick at the start of the Durban strikes of 1973 they marched to a nearby stadium led by a man with a red flag. This wasn’t a symbol of socialist solidarity; […]
IT is something of a mystery why South Africa has produced so few satirical writers: there is raw material everywhere. One of the best satirists of the apartheid years was Christopher Hope whose first book, […]