Politicians will live to regret whipping up 'pretend insurgencies' as a way of masking their own problems
Debacle deepens Zuma's younger supporters' sense of being under attack
The police may be poised to become the valve that releases this country's excrement into the political process
Which feels worse: the harried power of wealthy South Africans, or rich Ethiopians' cheery blindness to poverty?
The xenophobic attacks of May 2008 had a special impact on paler minorities
Even when people protest against the way the ANC runs South Africa, they do not contest its sole right to do so
I RECENTLY went on an imaginary voyage to a desert island where I came across a South African who had been stranded since 1980.
Apartheid's sorry tangle finds a successor in complicated, race-based mistrust
Nostalgia for National Party rule is not only wrong-headed, it endangers SA's future
Cops still treat young black men like farm animals on Friday night 'revenge' patrols
Whites build and blacks destroy? This false construct should be knocked down
Young South Africans and employers' love-hate relationship unlikely to change because of labour market reforms
Forget the 'golden age' - we have many useful things to learn from the flawed legends who led South Africa to freedom
JULIUS Malema is finally being buried. That is the word doing the rounds. His political grave may be taking a while to dig, we are told, but it is almost six feet deep now. Commentators are already minimising what he has meant to us; some speak of him as a bad dream from which we are waking.
THERE is a long-standing debate among pundits and commentators about Julius Malema. Is he the creation of elites, and thus a figure with little resonance among the young and the poor? Or are his intemperance, his anger and his racism embodiments of popular sentiment?
IN the mid-1990s, the University of the Witwatersrand anthropologist Hylton White spent two years in a settlement in the former KwaZulu.
WHENEVER a South African police officer is murdered, General Bheki Cele puts on his ceremonial gear and gives the fallen one a soldier's burial.
WHY did the News of the World scandal have us chained to our television screens? For one simple reason: when the authority of venerable institutions crumbles before our eyes, we keep watching. Scotland Yard, among the most self-assured police organisations of the Old World, is revealed to be in cahoots with tabloid reporters. Westminster's entire political class is caught turning a blind eye to serial crimes because that is how one acquires and keeps power.
IN whose footsteps is the ANC Youth League following? What is its pedigree? The answer is: not the youth league of the '40s, led by Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. That organisation bears little resemblance to the one that held its congress at Gallagher Estate this week.
IHAVE been struck by the depth of feeling with which South Africa greeted Albertina Sisulu's death. Her name had not passed anybody's lips in my presence in many months. It is quite possible that those I come across in my daily life had not thought of her in several years.