Jan van Riebeeck, commander of the Dutch post at the Cape, ranted in a diary entry of 28 January 1654 that the indigenous people’s misdeeds were hardly bearable any longer: “Perhaps it would be a better proposition to pay out …
Ramaphosa has slain the Rainbow Nation
A disrespectful Afrikaans expression refers to a person seeing their gat or backside. It means to get one’s comeuppance. In last week’s South African 2024 general elections, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) saw its gat and the only remaining …
South Africa’s young radicals are turning on Mandela
In 2021, at the age of 24, Chad Louw became South Africa’s youngest ever mayor. Then a member of the governing African National Congress party (ANC), Louw was elected in Oudtshoorn, a town in the Klein Karoo region of the …
The ANC has betrayed Nelson Mandela
Ten years after his death, the legacy of Nelson Mandela, for those few South Africans who bother to think about it, remains elusive. To many, he embodied a lost civility in interracial politics, a generosity of spirit, an unswerving faith …
South Africa’s infinite humiliation
Olive Schreiner, the South African author of The Story of an African Farm, surveyed her Edwardian society as an impoverished exile in London in a letter to a lifelong friend, John X Merriman. “A dead pall rests over the whole …
South Africa isn’t neutral on Ukraine
“Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division among us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.” Nelson Mandela, shortly before leaving office as president, urged constant vigilance against South Africa’s enemies, “even …
The plot against the Zulu King
In March 1881, Cetshwayo ka Mpande, the deposed King of the Zulus, wrote a letter from his Cape exile to the then Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Hercules Robinson, begging for the right to return to his conquered homeland:…
Anarchy rules South Africa
Personal attacks within the ANC come either by smear or funeral oration; the organisation’s strong traditions of omerta allow few other avenues. So when the former South African president Thabo Mbeki recently warned incumbent Cyril Ramaphosa that his inaction was …