there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Jonathan Lichtenstein, The Berlin Shadow: Living with the Ghosts of the Kindertransport (London: Scribner, 2020) HANS Eugen Lichtenstein, aged 12, arrived alone from Berlin at London’s Liverpool Street station in mid-1939, one of ten thousand […]
‘IF you’re not confused, you haven’t been paying attention’ (Tom Peters, rough paraphrase There are, quite suddenly, increasing numbers of new cases of coronavirus in the UK, the R number is now 1–1.2, and a […]
Michael Schmidt, Death Flight: Apartheid’s Secret Doctrine of Disappearance (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2020) PARKED at an East Rand airport you may find a Piper Seneca II, registered ZS-KFG. This is the aircraft used in the […]
Greg Ardé, War Party: How the ANC’s Political Killings are Breaking South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2020) ORGANISED crime resorts readily to violence; so it is no surprise that the ANC, which Durban-based journalist Greg […]
SOUTH Africa’s political pundits are forecasting major problems ahead for the African National Congress. Having run the country’s state institutions and its economy into the ground, it is currently mismanaging the Covid-19 epidemic. A string […]
Imtiaz A. Cajee, The Murder of Ahmed Timol: My Search for the Truth (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2020) AN inquest in 1972 returned a verdict of suicide. The re-opened inquest in 2017 concluded that murder had been […]
DAWN on Tuesday 21 July on the old Hesketh motor racing circuit south of Pietermaritzburg. Down below in the river valley was an intense fire that looked like the very definition of Hades. Above it […]
Jacob Dlamini, The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2020) DURING eight months in 1993, following a verbal command to destroy all operational records, South Africa’s state […]
‘AS well as longer-term proposals to reduce the incidence of obesity, government officials are having urgent discussions about how to persuade people to lose weight in the next few months, before an anticipated resurgence in […]
John Bercow, Unspeakable: The Autobiography (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2020) THE FORMER Speaker of the House of Commons is often described as a Marmite figure. By that measure (in a frank declaration of reviewer interest) I […]