there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
PREFACE Over the years Pietermaritzburg’s daily newspaper, The Witness, was kind enough to publish my opinion pieces and the occasional feature article. For a while the former appeared in the series ‘New Ground’, along with […]
IT was a remarkable, passionate outburst of the sort for which Desmond Tutu has become famous. In November 2011 he roundly denounced the South African government over its failure (again) to issue the Dalai Lama […]
DURING November 2003 the Anglican Diocese of Natal marked its 150th anniversary. Inevitably many of the celebrations focused on its first bishop, John William Colenso (1818−1883), who lived at the Ekukhanyeni mission just outside Pietermaritzburg […]
EDENDALE municipality has never existed, but it should have done. James Allison, the dissident Wesleyan missionary, arrived in Natal from Swaziland in 1847 with a destitute refugee community of 400 that had originated in Transorangia and settled […]
‘AWAKING on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’ This is Sol Plaatjie’s memorable verdict on the Natives […]
THREE trucks left Pietermaritzburg in mid-June 1955 en route to the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg. Some of their passengers were from the Indian community and they lacked the required permits to travel to the […]
THE ANC has persistently grumbled about the media and threatened for some while to launch its own daily newspaper. Backed by Gupta family money, its long-delayed appearance last month was somewhat ironic given the name of […]
‘WE do not know how long comment in this or any other newspaper in South Africa will remain free.’ That was the grim opening to the main leader in the Natal Witness on 31 March 1960. The […]
HE might well have been the first black leader of a free South Africa. The apartheid government saw him as so formidable an opponent that at the end of his three-year sentence for incitement it passed the […]
AFTER Ruth First was released from detention she wrote presciently that ‘it was not the end … they would come again.’ Indeed they did, with a letter bomb delivered to the Centre for African Studies […]