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  • About the writer
  • Sharp Thoughts
  • Book Reviews
  • Memoirs
  • Miscellaneous
  • Reflections on the Rainbow Nation
  • Sharp Sharp
  • Contact Me
  • Privacy Policy

Month: August 2017

  • Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography

    Helen ZILLE, Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography (Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2016) HELEN Zille arrived home one night after a visit to a Cape Town township believing her car had been stoned. However, […]

    August 23, 2017Book Reviews

     
  • 64. Caster Semenya: real and imagined victim

    SOUTH Africa’s minister of sport, Makhenkhesi Stofile, threatened war last week. Ironically, he did so a fortnight after 3 000 of the country’s soldiers mutinied in a violent demonstration outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria, […]

    August 18, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 65. ‘What is to be done?’: the rise of ethnic nationalism and the stalling of the two-stage revolution

    BANG in the middle of his budget speech last week, Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan made an unexpected, coded remark. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is to be done?’ He was using the title of a book […]

    August 18, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 66. FIFA World Cup, 2010: colonialism returns to South Africa

    THE next four years are going to be tough for those who have no affection for football or tolerance for the vuvuzela. With the latest round of the world head-butting, diving, and feigning injury championships having culminated […]

    August 17, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 67. Sport, community and the betrayal of the anti-apartheid movement

    IN 1989, the non-racial South African Soccer Federation hosted its national tournament in Pietermaritzburg. One of the administrators present, from the Eastern Cape Football Board, was Danny Jordaan. From photographs in the tournament brochure he […]

    August 17, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 68. Standing up for the constitution in the face of anarchy

    FRIDAY, 13 June 1986: the day the State of Emergency was declared. The Weekly Mail carried on its front page a picture of grim-faced policemen, sjamboks at the ready, marching on Khotso House in Johannesburg. […]

    August 16, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 69. Anger in the workplace and a widening wage gap

    IT’S become a a predictable part of the South African calendar. The strike season is with us again, one of those rituals that continues to set this country apart. Virtually everything about it appears to […]

    August 16, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 70. Public service and individual conscience: Wouter Basson and Sheryl Cwele

    PERHAPS not surprisingly, we are still haunted by the ghosts of apartheid. Some have faded into deserved obscurity. But the case of Wouter Basson is currently before the Health Professions Council, which is scrutinising his […]

    August 15, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 71. Heroism and a partisan history

    THE garden of remembrance at Freedom Park in Pretoria, according to our government, ‘symbolises the final resting place of the fallen heroes and heroines of the conflicts which shaped the history of South Africa’. But the […]

    August 15, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 72. A nation in mourning

    BEFORE Christmas 2013 it was reported that bookshops were faced with such a demand for titles on Nelson Mandela they ran out of stock. This proved to be a trifle exaggerated, but clearly the millions […]

    August 14, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     

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