South Africa’s foreign ministry has squandered the diplomatic capital built during the Mandela era, replacing strategic thinking with impulsive gestures and transforming the country from a respected global mediator into an increasingly isolated fringe player, writes Tony Leon. It’s a stretch to use words and phrases such as “thoughtful” or “long-term strategy” or even “principled consistency” [...]
Former president Thabo Mbeki’s lecture on historical materialism to KZN ANC comrades reveals a farcical ideological battle between the ANC and SACP over revolutionary labels, while real crises like mass job losses go unaddressed - echoing the dangerous political delusions and echo chambers that Scott Anderson’s new book shows led to Iran’s catastrophic 1979 revolution, [...]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that "the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected". This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, [...]
You need to go quite far back to find a time when SA had a universally admired president, his deputy — to whom no personal or financial scandal attached — was thoroughly engaged in keeping the machinery of government humming, and the country had a clear and serious view of its place and purpose in [...]
The death of acclaimed film critic Barry Ronge in early July was a jarring reminder to me of how he held our English 1 class at Wits University spellbound with his wit and articulacy 42 years ago. Ronge’s lecture topic back then was “the theatre of the absurd” — at the time very voguish with its [...]
Lebanese American polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb has gifted the world with imperishable ideas wrapped in memorable metaphors. In 2007 he published his ground-breaking book The Black Swan which illustrated the chaos caused by unpredictable, unprecedented events occurring outside the range of predictive probabilities bringing severe consequences in their wake. Some years before its publication, the late US [...]
Thomas More’s prescription sola mors tyrranicida est (“death is the only way to be rid of tyrants”) proved to be half-right when 95-year-old Robert Mugabe died in Singapore. Theoretically, it was not his physical demise but a political event, an in-house coup by his one-time trusted deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in 2017, which led to his downfall. But [...]
In 1967, US author Allen Drury wrote a book on apartheid South Africa entitled A Very Strange Society. Fifty years later, and two-plus decades into our post-apartheid story, we have added several new chapters to our national tragedy, though that title remains very contemporary. The strangest part started just shy of 10 years ago: at [...]
Shamefulness is a by-product of decency. Hlaudi Motsoeneng, who hiked his own salary into the stratosphere, clearly suffers from the opposite condition Synchronicity is the concept pioneered by psychologist Carl Jung who held that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship, but apparently are meaningfully related. Ben Trisk, the enterprising CEO [...]
YOU couldn‘t make it up. Peering at the world through chic European spectacles, shod in Italian shoes, chauffeured in a German car and the beneficiary of R25-million from a US-listed mining house, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete assailed Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema — and for even worse than being a “cockroach”. According to [...]
