Speculation has reached runaway-fire proportions that Schabir Shaik and Eugene de Kock are about to walk. Shaik has applied for a presidential pardon. This has been confirmed. The state president had a meeting with incarcerated De Kock, it is alleged and it could well be true. Meanwhile, the DA has submitted to Parliament a “private […]
Tinyiko Sam Maluleke
Tinyiko Sam Maluleke is a South African academic (currently attached to the University of South Africa [UNISA]) who suffers from restlessness, intellectual insomnia, insatiable curiosity, a facsination with ideas, a passion for justice, a crazy imagination as well as a big appetite for music, reading and writing.
He has lectured briefly at such universities as Hamburg in Germany, Lausanne in Switzerland, University of Nairobi in Kenya and Lund University in Sweden - amongst others.
Posted inGeneral
Spare a thought for Haiti
South Africa has disasters — political, ethical and economic disasters. We have a fat ruling elite which is increasingly drifting away from the needs and realities of the poor and marginalised. We have a ruling alliance which is forever quibbling about current and future spoils — a hobby in which they engage while dressed to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
And the winner is…
Some say the ANC’s annual January statement read out by the president on Saturday was long and boring. What kind of assessment is that? Where were these people when brother Moammar Gadaffi caused his own interpreter to collapse with exhaustion after speaking for 94 minutes at the UN last September? And what about the young […]
Posted inNews/Politics
His majesty, the king, your president
Friends, brothers, sisters, foreign nationals, national nationals, multi-nationals, my fellow South Africans; all protocol observed! It is with a double sense of worry and relief that I write to all of you. On the sixth day of the first month of the two thousandth and tenth year of our Lord, at about fourteen hundred hours, […]
Posted inLifestyle
The end! Can you hear the soundtrack?
At Eyethu Cinema in the Soweto of the 70s and early 80s, film endings would be announced with the projection of the words “The End” on the screen. At that time, the film-end soundtrack would commence in full voice as we filed out of the cinema in our usual disorderly and noisy manner. It always […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The trouble with Cope
My high school “piece job” entailed being an interpreter of maladies. It was my job was to find which tooth or teeth were loose, painful, rotten or all of the above at a dental surgery in Bree Street, Johannesburg. The resulting information would then be captured by yours truly on a piece of paper according […]
Posted inNews/Politics, Sport
How I wish we could postpone the Soccer World Cup
It is rather late in the day but methinks the matter is important enough to warrant a last-minute mention, if you will indulge me for a page or half. This thought has hitherto existed in the form of a stone-like lump at the bottom of my gut. From time to time it rises up to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Our much-loved Malema Dilemma
Are the fortunes of South Africa’s political enfant terrible – African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) President Julius Malema – falling? Hasn’t he been recently called a ‘drama queen’, a ‘sound bite politician’ and a ‘joke’? Was he was not effectively booed out of a political conference, by his own South African Communist Party (SACP) […]