Tinyiko Sam Maluleke

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 […]

Jacob Zuma was made to wait for three hours because the start of the ANCYL’s elective conference (Midrand, June 16 2011) was delayed by, among others, the late arrival of ANCYL president Julius Malema. Once the conference began, Zuma had to listen to Malema‘s wide-ranging, 90-minute speech — a speech that was not all that […]

What do South Africans have in common today? Only one answer can be given with certainty. Nelson Mandela! If there is a message that comes out of the International Mandela day which the world celebrated on Monday July 18, that message is the extent to which South Africans unite around the person of Nelson Mandela. […]

By pure coincidence, two apartheid-era South Africans, Mkhize and Van der Merwe — black and a white — find themselves as neighbours in a foreign a land. Back home they could never have been neighbours. But out there in foreign shores they “discover” that they actually have more in common than with anyone else around […]

Mandela and I have come a long way. Our story starts at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia. In those days he slept by day and slipped by night – Mandela by day and David Motsamai by night. One moment he was a dirty car mechanic. The next moment he was a Zulu man from Natal – […]

What does Julius Malema have in common with Annelie Botes? Apart from their chubby faces, that is. She and Malema are going places – each according to their considerable talents. Both hold views generally regarded as shocking on people they consider to be “the other” – blacks in the case of Botes and whites in […]

There’s a problem with the tense of a popular, communist freedom song which goes “my father was a garden boy, my mother was a kitchen girl, that’s why I am a communist, a communist, a communist”. Sometimes “socialist” is used instead of “communist”. In this song garden boys and kitchen girls are relegated to the […]

Never in the 17 years of democracy has the DA been driven to appeal so passionately, so desperately and in some ways so comically to the black voter. Launching its manifesto outside Pretoria, in Mamelodi, the DA (leader) has been doing a lot of “black things” lately. Helen Zille has not missed an opportunity to […]