2008

While the negotiations between the major parties on Zimbabwe’s future are ongoing, I have specifically avoided giving any commentary. This is being done to afford the negotiators every chance of succeeding while giving Zimbabwe’s starving masses the opportunity to receive aid. I therefore find the continued refusal to give the aid agencies access to the […]

Chief Lucas Mangope, of the erstwhile homeland of Bophuthatswana, once told a story about his childish indiscretions while wandering home, barefoot, through a watermelon field after a parched day tending sheep and cattle. Like all fallible humans, he became susceptible to the sweet lure of the bulbous fruit. Mangope told of his father’s admonition and […]

In 1992 the New York Times reported: “When he was still a policeman and not yet a mass murderer, Barend Strydom once stole a black man’s head from the scene of a highway wreck and posed for a snapshot of himself, the white avenger, holding the grisly prop aloft in one hand and a butcher’s […]

Matt Bai, in an article for the New York Times Sunday magazine, suggests that the rise of Barack Obama to presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States might well signal the end of “black politics” in that country. Black people, in accordance with Bai’s view, would, like the Irish and Italians, be swallowed […]