there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
SOUTH Africa’s political pundits are forecasting major problems ahead for the African National Congress. Having run the country’s state institutions and its economy into the ground, it is currently mismanaging the Covid-19 epidemic. A string […]
Imtiaz A. Cajee, The Murder of Ahmed Timol: My Search for the Truth (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2020) AN inquest in 1972 returned a verdict of suicide. The re-opened inquest in 2017 concluded that murder had been […]
DAWN on Tuesday 21 July on the old Hesketh motor racing circuit south of Pietermaritzburg. Down below in the river valley was an intense fire that looked like the very definition of Hades. Above it […]
Jacob Dlamini, The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2020) DURING eight months in 1993, following a verbal command to destroy all operational records, South Africa’s state […]
‘AS well as longer-term proposals to reduce the incidence of obesity, government officials are having urgent discussions about how to persuade people to lose weight in the next few months, before an anticipated resurgence in […]
John Bercow, Unspeakable: The Autobiography (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2020) THE FORMER Speaker of the House of Commons is often described as a Marmite figure. By that measure (in a frank declaration of reviewer interest) I […]
IN the 1980s, as a relatively young staff member on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of Natal, I had occasional encounters with the university vice-principal, Deneys Schreiner. I’ve recently read for pleasure and review […]
SOUTH Africa’s cricket ducks are no longer neatly in a row. Sooner or later there was bound to be a reckoning and the Black Lives Matter campaign has exposed a hidden rawness to the game […]
‘AMID mounting confusion over face masks inside takeaways, No 10 confirms once-and-for-all that masks are compulsory in the optional sense, unless you’re eating in, whereby they become optionally compulsory.’ (Have I Got News For You, […]
Philippa Garson, Undeniable: Memoir of a Covert War (Jacana, 2020) A CONSTANT presence in this book is the question of the third force. Was it, in the period leading up to South Africa’s first democratic […]