Boss, the old apartheid Bureau of State Security, is back, says Laurie Nathan, director of the Centre for Mediation in Africa. A process of ‘Stasi-fication’ is underway, claims DA MP David Maynier. What they are referring to is the proposed Intelligence General Laws Amendment Bill, the latest assault by the executive through the legislature on […]
Brent Meersman
Brent Meersman is a writer based in Cape Town. He is co-editor of GroundUp.org.za and a columnist for This is Africa. His most recent novel is Five Lives at Noon (2013), and his previous novels are Primary Coloured (Human & Rouseau, 2007) and Reports Before Daybreak (Umuzi-Random House, 2011). He has been writing for the Mail & Guardian since 2003. Follow him on Twitter or visit www.meersman.co.za
Posted inGeneral
Occupy Tshwane: behold the bourgeois revolution
You might think an ‘Occupy Movement’ would find fertile ground in a land as brutally unequal as South Africa, not to mention an economy virtually hostage to monopoly capital. Yet Occupy is primarily driven by an educated, salaried middle class, which has now found itself rapidly sinking into either economic ruin or, horror of horrors, […]
Posted inGeneral
Julius Malema: Why he will be missed
Juju bashing isn’t as much fun as it used to be. If you type Malema into Google, the second suggestion the browser makes is “Malema jokes”. The latest one is that his girlfriend has twins and Malema is wondering which of them is his. I’m not entirely comfortable with such jokes; I know some people […]
Posted inGeneral
The problem is not black and white
It was 1994 and a Canadian comic at a South African festival thought that given our apartheid history, he’d be edgy by poking fun at race. He got mere titters and derisory silences from the audience. He didn’t realise: we got race. We South Africans had been through race, come back and turned it inside […]
Posted inGeneral
Those who hate Mandela
I have never thought harder about whether or not to publish a piece. I do not want to write this piece, but feel compelled because I cannot sit quietly by as Nelson Mandela is rubbished by people who would divide and rule us. We should not jump to their bait, but be aware of the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Closing down democratic space is what is really counter-revolutionary
Private and unpublished correspondence by the South African poet Roy Campbell recently came into my possession. In a letter to Francis C. Slater, written in Rome sometime between September 1938 and February 1939, Campbell writes that “journalists are the greatest Social Poison the world has yet seen”. He goes on: “It is a treat to […]