In his address to students at the University of the Witwatersrand, the South African Human Rights Commission’s Jody Kollapen said that South Africans must prepare themselves for speech that will shock, disturb and offend them. “We’re going to find robust contestation around ideas,” Kollapen said. Cautioning the public against merely calling for this speech to […]
News/Politics
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Why Boesak appeals to disillusioned South Africans
I was asked by a reporter, after listening to Allan Boesak speaking at UWC last week, why people were attracted to his message. It’s not an easy question to answer because you have to consider all the water that has run under the bridge of Boesak’s life since his heyday in the 1980s. But after […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Presumed innocent, but is that enough?
Last year I spent a few hours in prison. Not as a guest of the state, I should add, but to accompany students on a study tour. Contrary to popular belief, a prison is not a great place to spend one’s life. It’s cramped and dark, the food is foul, one has no privacy and […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Blaspheming against liberals
On July 8, Britain finally abolished its archaic blasphemy laws. It is no longer a criminal offence for we Brits to speak or publish any contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous words relating to God, Jesus Christ or the Bible. Yet already a new system of blasphemy is filling the gap. Now, anybody who blasphemes against […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
A scenario for the SABC
The SABC’s board of directors is on its way out, but later rather than sooner. And what happens then? Those wanting them out don’t seem to have given enough thought to this. This conclusion emerges from current discussions in Parliament about a legal amendment that would force President Thabo Mbeki to fire the board. To […]
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Malema, yours is the cowardice, not the power or the glory
In death, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s life and works have once again taken centre stage. Arguably Russia’s greatest writer yet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he achieved enormous acclaim for exposing the flaws in the Soviet system at a time when it was not only unpopular but, in most cases, fatal to do […]
Posted inNews/Politics
ANC passes sell-by date — what will voters do?
The flip side of the adage that new brooms sweep clean is that old ones just can’t do the job right any more. The same is true of governments; they have a shelf life. There comes a time when an administration simply runs out of ideas and no longer has the will or cohesion to […]
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The African Future Times: Giving you tomorrow’s news today
Submitted by Angry African They say that America is ahead of the times. So I travelled there to see if I can get an insight into our African future. This is what I can report will happen in Africa over the next few weeks. It makes planning a bit easier. Parliament goes green The South […]
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Umshinis could kill our democracy
In February, a University of Limpopo student was beaten up and killed by three senior Sasco members for refusing to sing a “struggle” song. In need of a lift back to their campus, the Sasco members boarded a Student Christian Organisation-only minibus after a protest march in Pretoria. They aggressively ordered the students to stop […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Sunday Times continues to advance ‘gutter journalism’
The Sunday Times again continues to advance with remorseless regularity its branch of “gutter journalism”. This newspaper has over the years re-established itself as a Sunday tabloid. The story it ran on August 3 2008 about the bribe of R30-million alleged to have been paid to Thabo Mbeki is important, but the sensationalism of these […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Protection of information from whom?
At his Loftvus Versfeld birthday celebrations on Saturday, Nelson Mandela called upon members of the ANC not to celebrate the life of an individual but rather the organisation itself and its achievements after a prolonged struggle. Madiba went on to make further heartfelt pleas for party unity and a strengthening of our democracy in the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Puppy buried alive? I’ll bury the bastards
The Pietermaritzburg story about a seven-week-old puppy with two spears driven into it and then buried alive made my blood boil. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s animal cruelty. Imagine the mentality of the human filth that did this. Taking a defenceless animal and inflicting the cruelty of which only our disgusting species […]