There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Paul HOFFMAN, Confronting the Corrupt: Accountability Now’s Battle Against Graft in SA (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2016) CADRE deployment is the key to the epidemic of corruption that has systematically eaten away at the fabric of […]
HULLABALOO: it’s a word often applied to South African politics – and with good reason. In the year in which Jacob Zuma should relinquish the presidency of the African National Congress (and, much of the […]
ONE by one they gradually disappear from national political life. Ahmed Mohamed ‘Uncle Kathy’ Kathrada died on 28 March leaving behind just two fellow Rivonia trialists from 1964, Andrew Mlangeni and Denis Goldberg. And with […]
IN a modest personal archive I have two particularly prized documents: a British national identity card (discontinued 1952) and a ration book (food rationing ended in July 1954). But as a product of the post-1945 […]
THE beginning of each year raises the prospect of anniversaries, commemoration and appropriate reflection. Amongst many, this one will see the centenary of the sinking of the Mendi (21 February), the fortieth anniversary of the […]
BOOKS on South Africa’s recent history continue to roll off keyboards and printing presses, including a recent spate of memoirs and analyses of Mkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress […]
John HIGGINS, Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa: Essays and Interviews on Higher Education and the Humanities (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013) THIS is an unusual book: title and sub-title could be reversed, yet […]
THIS series of sermon-length reflections was given at St Alphege’s Church in Pietermaritzburg during 2016 encouraged by the Rector, Janet Trisk, to whom the writer extends his gratitude and thanks. Its focus was on the […]
POST-TRUTH (or post-factual) politics is term of the year according to Oxford Dictionaries. Sceptics might question when politics was ever about truth while history shows that the ascent of every totalitarian ideology, right or left, […]
Bridget HILTON-BARBER, Student, Comrade, Prisoner, Spy: A Memoir (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2016) WE are reminded by Timothy Garton Ash, journalist and academic expert on central Europe, that ‘the key to betrayal is trust’. And […]