there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Hestelle van Staden, Blood has a Voice: Stories from the Autopsy Table (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2023) SHE describes herself as a normal middle-aged, suburban woman; but her profession would be regarded by many as highly […]
Max Price, Statues and Storms: Leading Through Change (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2023) THERE’S a song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance that has the refrain ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one …’ […]
Narcissistic, thin-skinned, unprofessional, threatening, intimidating and abusive on social media; with an inclination to create and exploit racial divisions. These are some of the descriptors used by an independent panel chaired by Lex Mpati tasked […]
Faeeza Ballim, Eskom: Power, Politics and the (Post) Apartheid State (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2023) FOR many years a joke has gone the rounds. Satan is visiting South Africa and is sitting at a bar. ‘And who,’ […]
Joel B. Pollak, Rhoda: A Biography: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order!’ (Johannesburg: UJ Press, 2023) CONTRARIAN is the word Joel Pollak chooses to best describe the complex Rhoda Kadalie. Her life moved from […]
IT was the most banal of events: fifty years ago, in mid-October 1973, two cricket teams met in the local league in Alexandra Park, Pietermaritzburg. But one of them, Aurora, comprised players from different ethnic […]
THE TRADITIONAL categorisation of political ideology and practice occupying a spectrum stretching from left to right is now obsolete. It was always problematic if considered at the point where far right collided with far left […]
CONSULT a history book and it will probably tell you that the United Democratic Front (UDF), launched forty years ago on 20 August 1983, was the internal wing of the ANC. It is true that […]
Salim S. Abdool Karim, Standing up for Science: A Voice of Reason: South Africa’s Chief Covid-19 Adviser at the Frontlines of the Pandemic (Johannesburg: Macmillan, 2023) OUR first authoritative assessment of the Covid-19 pandemic, autobiography, […]
The mutinous Yevgeny Prigozhin seems to have survived his failed insurrection relatively well. While his Wagner Group fighters in Ukraine have been absorbed into the Russian army, their presence in Africa continues unaltered and largely […]