News/Politics

AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche, addressing the Vryheid Agricultural Union last Thursday, called on the ANC to grant the Afrikaners a homeland. “We gave blacks their homelands. Why don’t the ANC do the same for us?” Sort of a little laager on the prairie — spare me. I’d like to call on the ANC on behalf […]

When Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU, later ZANU-PF) rose up against white minority rule in the 1960s and 1970s, they carried the backing of the majority of Zimbabweans and the world community. ZANU-PF and its class of 2008 carry the endorsement of neither. Where once they were the bearers of hope […]

The only thing Britain’s Labour Party has in common with the country’s working people is its name. It’s been demonstrated over and over again in the past two decades that parties claiming to uphold the interests of the poor must do more than just being seers of truth and guardians of traditions. The neo-liberal agenda […]

The barbaric violence, including the intimidation and killings that silenced the ho hum of the rainbow nation for the past three weeks, has finally subsided. Ordinary South Africans, after witnessing the bloodshed sprayed all over their newspapers and television screens, appear to have returned to the daily drama of their own lives. Of course, the […]

Most observers must have been shaken from their self-delusion about Barack Obama’s supposedly more “humane and wise approach to foreign policy” after he addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on the 4th June 2008. There is nothing pacifist nor anything anti-imperialist about the man’s political outlook, less so about his foreign policy orientation. Beneath […]

Robert Mugabe is one lucky dictator, being in the enviable position of having outsourced his foreign diplomacy efforts to the South African government. By preventing a discussion in the United Nations Security Council on Zimbabwe’s political situation, South Africa is doing its utmost to ensure that the international community does nothing about the tyrannous regime’s […]

This week’s Talkback question on the Mail & Guardian Online: Only thousands at Million Man March: Bad timing or lack of interest?

One of my next projects, once I’ve finished the third and final volume of the South African Insult series (The Revenge of the South African Insult, which will feature a black cover with glow-in-the-dark writing), is an examination of the Australian insult. It’s a daunting task, and not just because it means reading many Australian […]

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called on England cricketers to boycott Zimbabwe, on Robert Mugabe to resign and on the United Nations to send in peacekeepers for the presidential run-off. South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate is in no mood to allow the violence that is destabilising the region to go on unchallenged. Captain Courageous, never […]