Which General – Which ANC?
AT the time of the May 1987 South African general election, when the apartheid government was on its last legs, stickers were distributed reading ‘The trouble … is we don’t know which general we are […]
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Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall; and We Are No Longer At Ease: The Struggle for #FeesMustFall
Adam Habib, Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall (Jonathan Ball, 2019); and Wandile Ngcaweni and Busani Ngcaweni (eds) We Are No Longer at Ease: The Struggle for #FeesMustFall (Jacana, 2018) WORLDWIDE, the shelf life of […]
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Child at the Edge and End of Empire: A Memoir of Nassau in the 1960s
PRELUDE What we call ‘my life’ is but a constantly rewritten version of our own past. ‘My life’ is the mental autobiography with which and by which we all live. What really happened is quite […]
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To Kill the Truth
SAM Bourne is the author of political thrillers. His real-life persona is Jonathan Freedland, one of the Guardian’s acute columnists and a commentator on British current events, especially Brexit, and Jewish affairs. His opinion piece […]
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Africa’s Holocaust
‘IN Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.’ Those […]
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Social media and the coarsening of debate
VIEWERS of the SATV soap opera ‘Isidingo’ will recall Horizon Deep mayor Sechaba Matabane-Moloi being set up in a supposedly drug-induced orgy at a Christmas party by his deputy Gabriel Motusi. The devious Motusi missed […]
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I Beg to Differ: Ministry Amid the Teargas
Peter Storey, I Beg to Differ: Ministry Amid the Teargas (Tafelberg, 2018) THOSE who lived through the State of Emergency of the 1980s will not have forgotten the Candle of Peace, Hope and Justice, a […]
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Lies, politics and history
A CONVENIENTLY forgotten aspect of the long, convoluted and unresolved saga of Brexit is the fact that the successful Leave campaign in 2016 was based on a stack of lies and a raft of other […]
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Disappointments of working lives
A CROWNING moment of a lifetime’s professional work would in the past have been a handing over to one’s younger, competent successor confident that while times inevitably move on values and principles would be carefully […]
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The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas
Harris Dousemetzis with Gerry Loughran, The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas (Jacana, 2018) EXACTLY who was Hendrik Verwoerd’s assassin? In this comprehensive, thoroughly researched account of the life of Dimitri Tsafendas, […]