While South Africa faces xenophobic blowback from its African neighbours, the ANC’s Nomvula Mokonyane spent Africa Day in Moscow – a telling snapshot of a party whose foreign policy is mired in Cold War nostalgia, writes Tony Leon. Nomvula Mokonyane, ANC deputy secretary-general, fronts the party’s foreign policy and heads its international engagements. This week on [...]
While Cyril Ramaphosa traded shame and fury in Parliament over SA’s jobs catastrophe, three of the world’s foremost historians gathered in Franschhoek to offer the kind of honest reckoning our leaders refuse to have with themselves, writes Tony Leon. Two sobering insights were offered last week on the state of SA Inc. Last Tuesday, the Quarterly [...]
Two leaders, two continents, one embattled defiance – Keir Starmer and Cyril Ramaphosa are clinging to power, but while Britain’s crisis is political, South Africa’s cuts far deeper, writes Tony Leon. “When the herd moves, it moves,” Boris Johnson ruefully remarked when his Conservative Party forced his exit as UK prime minister in July 2022, just two [...]
On the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution, a UCT lecture reflecting on the country’s dwindling Jewish minority offers a telling measure of whether the constitutional promise of minority rights – made in Parliament on 8 May 1996 – is being honoured for all South Africans, writes Tony Leon. In places and events, both obvious and [...]
