2011

By Fiona Snyckers Some recent attempts by the media to condemn Constitutional Court Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng on the basis of certain carefully excerpted snippets from his judgments have placed me in the parlous position of seeming to side with those who would go easy on the perpetrators of violence against women and children. As a […]

The African National Congress’s (ANC) decision to charge youth league president Julius Malema and the punting of the Protection of Information Bill, which is to be put before Parliament for debate — while seemingly unrelated — are both manifestations of the same malady afflicting the ruling party. The discussion in both Johannesburg and Cape Town […]

It is inescapably true that the asset base of the white community benefited directly from – within living memory – depriving others of property and the right to trade to acquire property. 



By Joseph Dana There is an old joke about two stocky Austrian men walking down a street in Vienna. One of the men turns to the other with an open newspaper and says, “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” Slovenian philosopher Slavoj […]

By Jan Radley I was amused by the humour and irony in a recent Madam and Eve cartoon. The contention was that Malema is responsible for much of what is wrong in South Africa, a notion which was tested without success in the particular cartoon. One can only hope that the amount of publicity bestowed […]

By Adam Wakefield South Africa has one of the world’s highest Gini coefficients, a measure of disparity of wealth. Placed second behind Namibia in 2005 (according to the CIA World Factbook), while much has changed in South Africa in the following six years, a disproportionate number of South Africa’s citizens still live in poverty. If […]

The 30th of August – 30 BC – is the day on which Cleopatra the famous seventh queen of Egypt committed suicide. Apparently, she deliberately poked an Egyptian cobra until it was so angry it bit her. In Shakespeare’s version of the story – Anthony and Cleopatra – Cleopatra died holding the snake that bit […]