News/Politics

Yesterday in response to my call for amnesty for both the president and the ANC president, upon the basis set out therein, I received a couple of responses from readers suggesting that it might be of benefit to the country if the ANC centre and the ANC left formed two separate parties. While I don’t […]

I was thinking about xenophobia today. In fact, these days I think about it far too often. The death of a friend in Kinshasa prompts today’s thoughts. Nathalie Muteba was a young and extremely gifted journalist at Radio Okapi, a national radio network covering the Democratic Republic of Congo. On Friday Nathalie died suddenly of […]

This weekend, news in Australia was enlivened by

A key issue in reaching a settlement in Zimbabwe is going to be parties being able reach an accommodation on the outgoing president and Zanu-PF. As in the case of the National Party prior to 1994, there is too much baggage being carried by Mugabe and his party for them to simply allow for a […]

The Obama road-show is building up to quite an event. It would come as no surprise if one were to discover that a Hollywood director had a hand in the staging of the show. A shot of the air force plane landing in Berlin, suitably adorned with Obama’s logo, made a statement; never mind the […]

President Thabo Mbeki has again displayed strength of character and human will, as well as signifying the triumph of eloquent persuasion over destructive populism, grandstanding and mindless theatrics that many of his misguided detractors pressured him towards. Before the mass population of the country was liberated from the tyranny of apartheid, even in the dying […]

One common mistake about neo-conservative/right-wing thought and the general trend that followed in the wake of Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, is that Islam “colonised” Africa. This suggestion that Islam “colonised Africa” was reflected in Lyndall Beddy’s comment of 23 July. While I hold no brief for Muslims or Islam, it should be made clear that […]

Jon Qwelane and Richard Catto have at least three things in common. For a start, they’re great at generating insults. So I’m quite fond of both of them from a purely selfish point of view; the more material the merrier. Secondly, they’re both good at pissing people off, and thirdly, neither of them sets much […]

This week’s Talkback question on the Mail & Guardian Online: Is the ANC going the way of the old National Party?

That the physicist and self-proclaimed absolute pacifist Albert Einstein inspired the development of the most devastating weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb, is no secret. His theory of relativity concludes that a large amount of energy could be released from a small amount of matter, hence the equation E=MC2, meaning that energy equals mass […]