there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
RECENTLY, on 6 September, yet another apartheid functionary took with him to the grave secrets of the past without being put through a conclusive truth process. The dead man was João Rodrigues, the last surviving […]
John R. Schlapobersky, When They Came for Me: The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2021) IN John Schlapobersky’s case they came on Friday 13 June 1969 in the middle of a […]
Tyrone August, Dennis Brutus: The South African Years (Cape Town: BestRed, 2020) ALTHOUGH renowned as a poet, political activist, journalist and teacher, with a life story that is relatively well-known, Dennis Brutus has proved an […]
THIRTY years after the fall of apartheid and Cricket South Africa (CSA) is involved in protracted hearings about social justice and nation building; in essence a truth commission to look at what has happened to […]
Dominique Malherbe, Searching for Sarah: The Woman who Loved Langenhoven (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2021) SARAH (Saartjie) Eva Goldblatt was born in London on Christmas Day 1889 to a Jewish family that emigrated to South Africa […]
Robert Schapiro, Secrets from the Cockpit: Pilots Behaving Badly and Other Flying Stories (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2021) WHEN I was young, we dressed up in our best clothes to travel by plane. Passengers were treated […]
In his address to the nation on Friday 16 July, President Cyril Ramaphosa was blunt: recent public violence and looting had been ‘a deliberate, co-ordinated and well-planned attack on [South Africa’s] democracy … The constitutional […]
Jeremy Vearey, Into Dark Water: A Police Memoir (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2021) THIS is a curate’s egg of a book. Correctly sub-titled as memoir, it is the work of a former MK soldier and ANC […]
TUESDAY 1 June was an unusually bleak winter’s day in Pietermaritzburg after an overnight thunderstorm that lingered on into the morning together with Eskom power outages. It became even more remarkable in the university suburb […]
ON Friday 8 July, just over a day after Jacob Zuma was jailed, a distressed truck driver phoned SAFM radio to say that he was being attacked on the N3, southern Africa’s main economic highway […]