there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Ralph Mathekga, The ANC’s Last Decade: How the Decline of the Party will Transform South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2021) IN his foreword, Stephen Grootes makes the telling observation that in an age of growing […]
NUMEROUS activists died as a result of the brutality and dirty tricks of the apartheid state; many in circumstances yet to be fully investigated. But the death of Albert Luthuli is unlikely to be one […]
THE FIRE that destroyed the Reichstag (German parliament) in Berlin on 27 February 1933 was one of the most significant events in modern history. Blamed on communists, it enabled President Paul von Hindenburg to issue […]
ON Sunday 20 December last year, a telling two-part cameo played itself out in Pietermaritzburg. Residents of Northdale gathered at a primary sub-station that had exploded the previous Thursday leaving hundreds without electricity in an […]
Susan Williams, White Malice: The CIA and the Neo Colonisation of Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2021) ‘THE AMERICANS were everywhere.’ This was the view of CIA asset Washington Okumu, a Kenyan well-known to South Africans as […]
Paul Erasmus, Confessions of a Stratcom Hitman (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2021) THERE was no so-called third force: the propaganda, dirty tricks and orchestrated violence of the transition to democracy were part of Stratcom, a project that […]
Bill Freund, An Historian’s Passage to Africa: An Autobiography (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2021) WHAT were the chances of an economic historian from Chicago finding the happiest days of a somewhat unsettled life in Durban? […]
Richard Conyngham, All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa, 1910‒1948: A Graphic History (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2021) THIS illustrated history is largely inspired by files found in the basement archives of the Supreme Court of […]
Ebbe Dommisse, Fortunes: The Rise and Rise of Afrikaner Tycoons (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2021) TWO dozen tycoons are the central characters of Ebbe Dommisse’s book; just one, unsurprisingly, a woman. Among these Afrikaans-speakers none is […]
Qaanitah Hunter, Kaveel Singh and Jeff Wicks. Eight Days in July: Inside the Zuma Unrest that Set South Africa Alight (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2021) ON Monday and Tuesday 12 and 13 July this year our […]