Gaslighting - which derives its name from a popular 1930’s movie - is a psychological condition denoting a "form of emotional manipulation in which a person aims to have the victim question their judgement, perception and sense of reality by deliberately and systematically feeding false information". In turn, this leads - for the target of [...]
For 29 days in June, South Africa was gripped by a political drama. eNCA goes behind closed doors to uncover the make-or-break moments that forged the government of national unity. https://www.enca.com/shows/29-days-june-annika-larsen-special-report
When Donald J Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president on 20 January 2017, he delivered a dystopian speech on the state of his nation, summarised as "American Carnage". Leaving that event, George W Bush, the 43rd president and last Republican to hold that office before Trump, remarked on his successor's oration: "That was some weird s..t." [...]
"Never make predictions, least of all about the future" is wise advice. Undeterred by such caution, three years ago, in 2021, in my book, Future Tense - Reflections on my Troubled Land, I suggested that, in 2024, 30 years after the founding democratic election here, the liberation party would likely run out of road and face defeat [...]
After the fog of war lifted from the industrial-scale slaughter which characterised the killing fields of the First World War, which ended in 1918, a psychoanalyst offered an acute observation. Sometimes, he suggested, the difference whether a soldier was awarded a medal for gallantry or was executed for cowardice, "depended in which direction the person [...]
More than a decade back, I had a memorable dinner in Buenos Aires with a former White House speechwriter for President George W Bush. One of the guests present asked him what it was like to work for the 43rd President of the United States. Bush was famously regarded by voters as being both a [...]
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 [...]
