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 …
South Africa’s stagnant election
Shortly before Britain’s skelm (furtive) and short-lived annexation of the Transvaal Boer republic, the Victorian travel writer Anthony Trollope said this of the unfortunate country:
“These people in the Transvaal would not pay a stiver of tax, there was in …
The burden of Jewish privilege
We Jews have an old joke about the Holocaust: Abie Cohen, after being gassed and burnt in Auschwitz, goes to heaven. After a few weeks of waiting patiently, he eventually gets to see God and demands to know if the …
The curious case of Israeli ‘genocide’
Since the early 1600s, the Bavarian town of Oberammergau has, once a decade, mounted a massive Passion Play, dramatically re-enacting Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. Spread over five hours and with a cast of thousands, it has for centuries attracted audiences …
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 …
Britain is turning into South Africa
I’ve always suspected that Europeans are incapable of understanding South Africa, the strange and complicated nation where I was born and often return. At bottom, the issue is this: how can people so accustomed to safety, stability and a well-functioning …
The dawn of the Brics World Order
Last week’s Brics summit was supposed to herald the dawn of a new world order. It would announce the end of the American era and the rise of another, this time belonging to developing nations. It would even, according to …
Lessons from an old-school mercenary
The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, master mercenary, readily evokes a host of analogies: Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, King Phillip IV’s immolation of the Knights Templar, the Biblical injunction that he who takes up the sword shall.
I have …
Will Russia split up the Brics?
When the 15th annual Brics summit gathers in Johannesburg next week, the vaunting hope of the five invested countries will be that the group finally begins to show some of its initial promise. The host, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, …
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 …
Will South Africa’s sullied President survive?
On Christmas Day 2019, a mysterious North African buyer, flush with hundreds of thousands of dollar bills, allegedly arrived unannounced at a game farm owned by South Africa’s President Ramaphosa (then absent) and bought 20 buffalo from a lodge caretaker. …
Why South Africa is siding with Russia
It was a Russian oligarch’s superyacht scudding towards Cape Town that brought global attention to South Africa’s refusal to condemn Russian aggression. A couple of weeks ago, both Cape Town’s Mayor and the Premier of the Western Cape — members …