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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: October 2017

  • 45. Mandela: the long walk ends

    THE long walk of Nelson Mandela has become something of a cliché. But it is hard to find a more suitable metaphor for a life that moved from herding cattle in Tembuland to the world’s most prominent […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 46. It’s all in the label

    SHOOTING THE MESSENGER, the bearer of unwelcome tidings, is a well-known national failing. In South Africa we have a bad habit of attaching labels to people and ideas and using them as a substitute for […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 47. Political opposition: chihuahua or watchdog?

    WITH a third resounding general election victory under the ANC’s belt and competitors falling by the wayside, it has become fashionable to argue that opposition in the traditional parliamentary sense is no longer necessary in […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 48. Undermining the prospect of the rainbow nation

    THE historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 1900s the ‘short’ twentieth century. It began, he argues, with the start of the Great War in 1914 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990; […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 49. The re-racialisation of South African society

    EVERY year schoolteachers collect information on children by race and activity. Some bureaucrat somewhere could presumably tell you the number of coloured chess players, African cricketers, Indian choristers and white dancers in our schools. If […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 50. Fear and self-censorship: enemies of academic freedom

    RECENTLY, a number of letters from staff and students of the University of KwaZulu-Natal have appeared in The Witness. At one stage their common, and most notable, characteristic was that their authors chose to remain anonymous, or […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 51. Street renaming and airbrushing of history

    THE issue of street and building renaming in Pietermaritzburg has returned to the fore of public debate rather more rapidly than many would have expected or desired. Judging from the letters columns of The Witness […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 52. Legalism, bureaucracy and poor governance

    ‘THERE is no country in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality’. These were the words of Alexis […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 53. Corruption: a betrayal of trust

    ‘AMONG people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist’: so wrote the political philosopher Edmund Burke in 1777. In the dying days of the white Parliament in the early nineties, the editor of the Mail & Guardian, Phillip […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     
  • 54. Leaders, national institutions and moral decline

    WE live in an age of overworked phrases. For a long while we were exhorted to level those uneven playing fields. Then the rainbow nation made its promising debut, only to be undermined by nepotism and […]

    October 27, 2017Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

     

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