An Orwellian South Africa?
LIKE Kafka, George Orwell (Eric Blair) left his eponymous mark on history; plus anticipation of a particular forthcoming year. It’s now forty years since 1984, which turned out not to embody the dystopic future Blair […]
-
-
Breaking the Bombers: How the Hunt for Pagad Created a Crack Police Unit
Mark Shaw, Breaking the Bombers: How the Hunt for Pagad Created a Crack Police Unit (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2023) THE NEGOTIATED political settlement of the early 1990s opened up South Africa in more ways than […]
-
South Africa’s upcoming elections
MUCH is being made of the fact that a large number of the world’s nations will be holding general elections this year. Some will of course be a farce: Vladimir Putin will be reaffirmed as […]
-
Moscow on the veld
WE may never know exactly how Alexei Navalny died. One possibility put forward by someone familiar with such matters is that he was forced to stay out in sub-zero temperatures and then punched in the […]
-
Capture in the Court: In Defence of Judges and the Constitution
Dan Mafora, Capture in the Court: In Defence of Judges and the Constitution (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2023) THIRTY years down the line from its first democratic elections, the political landscape of South Africa may best […]
-
Death and hypocrisy
UNBRIDLED adulation: that seems to be the default reaction at the passing of any prominent figure closely associated with the ANC. We’ve seen it again recently with the death of Mbongeni Ngema in a head-on […]
-
20 Battles: Searching for a South African Way of War, 1913-2013
Evert Kleynhans and David Brock Katz, 20 Battles: Searching for a South African Way of War, 1913‒2013 (Johannesburg: Delta Books, 2023) THE PURPOSE of this book, written by military scientists and historians, is to identify […]
-
The Thabo Bester Story: The Facebook Rapist, the Celebrity Doctor and the Escape from Cell 35
Marecia Damons and Daniel Steyn, The Thabo Bester Story: The Facebook Rapist, the Celebrity Doctor and the Escape from Cell 35 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2023) IT is tempting to regard this story as truth stranger […]
-
The universal suppression of women’s rights: Womandla!
IT’S been a grim year. Extremism and fundamentalism have taken a tighter grip on the planet; the conflict in Palestine being yet another instance in which the forces of reason and moderation have been sidelined. […]
-
Back to the Front: A Memoir
Leon Levy, Back to the Front: A Memoir (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2023) BOOKENDING a life seems an appropriate approach to memoir, although in this case Leon Levy does it unevenly. Born in 1929, he left South […]