Unlikely a place as England might be for a political earthquake, it is perhaps the setting for a great unravelling In July 1961, in London's West End, a new musical play debuted to critical and commercial success. Entitled Stop the World - I Want to Get Off , it was set in a circus. Last [...]
Alan Paton would not have shrunk from crucial change whatever the cost, writes Tony Leon Way back in 1974, in the village of Botha’s Hill when KZN was called Natal, apartheid was at its apogee and South Africa was another country, the boarding school I attended there played host to its most distinguished resident. Alan [...]
VOLTAIRE’S Dr Pangloss believed that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". With Tshwane now in flames, ANC ministers at war with each other and a winter of discontent everywhere, it’s hard to be a Panglossian optimist. Fear not, aside from tuning into the SABC, you can always read the [...]
'The ideological attraction of our government to authoritarian Iran perhaps lies in the unquiet grave of past history' Here is a tale of three countries. Let‘s call them A, B and C. Country A is experiencing its worst drought in living memory. Last year, according to one report, country A recorded its lowest rainfall “since [...]
Exactly seventy-two years ago on Monday, June 6 1944, over 150000 allied troops stormed the Nazi-held beaches of Normandy, France, a day immortalised as D-Day. D-Day began the final, though bloody, phase of the war against Hitler and the liberation of Europe from the Nazi jackboot, achieved with finality the following spring, on May 8 [...]
Cynics here and elsewhere might think it appropriate that South Africa's face overseas is that of a criminal accused Readers might have observed last week's moving ceremony in Hiroshima, when Barack Obama made history by becoming the first US president to visit the city America hit with an atom bomb in 1945 . Less noticed, [...]
