How, in the face of unimaginable horror in the deepest pit of a dystopian nightmare, surrounded by mass death, do you maintain a scintilla of faith and hope? That horror, the Nazi Holocaust and its factories of industrialised human slaughter, featured in several conversations at last weekend’s Franschhoek Literary Festival. The most direct and extraordinary [...]
Three recent events compel attention and suggest the narrow path South Africa treads between possible salvation and collapse. We don’t have the luxury to follow advice from Yogi Berra, the famed US baseball catcher, who said: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Two of the events occurred on the same [...]
In April 1992 Britain’s most read newspaper, The Sun, hit its readers with a vivid front page on election day. Across a photograph of Labour leader and electoral favourite Neil Kinnock, placed in a light bulb, ran the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” [...]
I was in New York the day after the November 2004 US presidential election. George W Bush’s re-election — by a far wider margin than the polls had predicted — was of immediate interest. However, it was a column by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, published that day in the New York Times, that set out for [...]
Eight months since the current plague emerged from Wuhan, China, we face disrupted lives, shattered livelihoods, a wrecked economy and more to come. This unhappy picture, though, has one silver lining for those who believe in grown-up solutions and global responses to an international crisis such as the novel coronavirus – described as a “once-in-a-century [...]
Freedom Day 2020 was the most baleful in SA’s recent history since we spent it under house arrest. That phantom from our past, ostensibly banished by our 1996 constitution, is back with a vengeance due to a viral pathogen we cannot see, cannot interdict effectively but can, under stringent conditions, delay. And since so little is known [...]
Here's a remarkable and democratically depressing fact: South African voters rarely change their national government. Under the whites-only franchise until 1989, the National Party won an extraordinary 11 consecutive elections. Since the advent of full democracy in 1994, the ANC has won five polls on the trot. The 40-plus percentage points separating the ANC from [...]
In Malema’s delicate phraseology, “We are going for your white man, we are going to cut your throat” His view on nationals from the key Brics nations? “Chinese are like Indians. They think they are close to whiteness. When they practise racism, they are even worse than whites.” Of course this bilious and crude ethnic [...]
A few days late and many dollars short‚ as the old saying goes‚ Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday in East London delivered the ANC January 8 statement in celebration of the movement’s 106th anniversary. The lack of funds is not a reflection on the self-styled Buffalo Man’s huge net worth‚ but on the costly populist promises [...]
"Finance minister Pravin Gordhan, stands like Horatio on the bridge trying to hold back the ratings agencies" A FRIEND of mine in London sent me an amazing betting statistic. If you had wagered a paltry £5 on a trifecta of Leicester City winning the Premier League in May, Britain voting for Brexit in June and [...]
