By Howard Sackstein This week the South African ambassador to Israel was summoned by his hosts for a severe reprimand. Our government’s increasingly aggressive stance on Israel has caused relations between Jerusalem and Pretoria to implode. One by one we have watched our despotic friends in the Middle East tumble from power and we watch […]
apartheid
Posted inNews/Politics
How far we’ve fallen
By Rafique Gangat As SA’s first career diplomat of colour, I am pained to learn of what is happening to my beloved country. I took part in the painful struggle for freedom and eventually shared in the joy of liberation and democracy in 1994 and since then worked tirelessly to build the new SA. My […]
Posted inNews/Politics
A Madiba child
By Shireen Mukadam I had a dream. I was lying on the grass of the Boston Commons surrounded by three new friends. A Jordanian-Syrian, studying in Australia. A Catalonian Spaniard working in Colombia. And Marube from Kenya — a 52-year-old, who has aspirations of resuming his law degree, which he commenced at 26 in 1986 […]
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White males, naked capitalism and ending economic apartheid
The country watches transfixed as the ANC creaks and groans like a wooden ship trapped in Antarctic ice. The ANC has long kept the lid on things, like some benevolent dictator might have done. But now the ship threatens to break apart. There goes the life boat. People cling to its splintered timbers hoping these […]
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How communists paid the price and capitalists scooped the pool in post-apartheid SA
When Mandela first met with Sol Kerzner it was not, as was the case with most of his post-release meetings with big-hitting capitalist exploiters, to solicit (or more accurately, quietly demand) a large donation for black upliftment projects. Instead, the purpose was purely political. This was mid-1990, a time when it was not at all […]
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Dignity in la-la land: Why anybody can’t paint anybody’s penis
By Leonhard Praeg We all know that political liberals live in a la-la land that hovers, somewhat like a virtual reality, over the real geography of political time and space. For citizens of la-la land “freedom of expression” is the same in South Africa as it is in Zimbabwe as it is in New Zealand, […]
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How can we see from this high horse?
There are too many high horses in South Africa. Too many haughty opinions. And not enough people admitting to their faults. We need to all climb down and roll around in the muck for a bit. Act like pigs and love it. Admit that we are shit and get on with it. I will not […]
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I apologise for apartheid
By Ronèe Robinson Ag hemel – wat op aarde het FW besiel? (What on earth got into FW?) Does he really believe that apartheid merely failed because black people did not want to live with separate development? What about all the injustices that were perpetrated under apartheid? Apartheid was not merely about a dream (or […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
FW: Why sorry is the hardest word
Amidst the blanket coverage of FW De Klerk’s remarks on CNN, few have stopped to consider that Mr de Klerk may actually have meant what he said, and said what he meant. I believe De Klerk will be judged a towering figure of history, and that his closest historical proxy is Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev did […]
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Apartheid for better or for worse
I have fallen into the trap myself: become so outraged by government mismanagement that I wanted to beat them with the biggest stick I could: “It is worse than it was under apartheid!” Unfortunately, this is not what “worse than under apartheid” communicates to most South Africans. It is all too easily read as “better […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Only an apartheid president would defend apartheid
It’s amazing how many whites keep singing the song that apartheid was a heinous crime against humanity, that it was inhumane, and that they didn’t support it. It’s also amazing how they become silent corroborators when apartheid villains like FW de Klerk go on international public platforms not only to justify apartheid but to actually […]
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Condoning corruption: The Achilles heel of SA’s democracy
In the dying days of the old National Party regime, when I was still working at the old Africana Museum (now Museum Africa), I was given a first-hand taste of the corruption that was by then running rampant at all levels of government. It was just before the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain and […]