American dissident and writer James Baldwin once noted you can judge the state of a nation’s educational level by the quality of its political speech. By this metric, and on both measures, SA today scores off the charts. Hot on the heels of the global report (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) revealing that 81% [...]
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 [...]
Never underestimate the electoral hay ultranationalist leaders harvest by attacking “the West” when their at-risk regimes are imperilled. I recall November 1977 when I was a first-year student at Wits University, observing hardline nationalist prime minister John Vorster deliver a furious speech at the Film Trust Arena in Johannesburg on the eve of the white [...]
British statesman Roy Jenkins wrote of the life and career of French soldier-leader Charles de Gaulle that “compared with his companions on the world stage [De Gaulle] had mostly to play a poor hand from a weak seat”, adding that “he behaved in a way which, seeking grandeur, invited ridicule, yet always escaped it. He was [...]
Writing in the Financial Times this week, Sarah O’Connor confessed: “I hate big numbers. Or rather I hate it when big numbers are used to impress or bamboozle rather than to make sense of the world.” This struck a chord when I recalled a senior maven at our National Treasury advising: “Cyril [Ramaphosa] loves big [...]
