I recently finished reading The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. I last read the book shortly after it was first released in 2009. The book made quite a splash at the time in the UK, but I don’t recall a similar fuss being made about the book in South Africa. But I…
By way of introduction, a polder is Dutch for land that has been reclaimed from the sea. As the saying goes, God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands. So what do polders have to do with this blog? Post Second World War Dutch society was characterised by, what the British press derisively…
Its possibly part of my genetic makeup, but I am a firm believer in consensus (or what the Dutch call “poldermodel”) and multilateralism. In essence, everyone needs to adhere to the rules in order to ensure that life can operate in a fairly predictable manner. In December 2009 I blogged about the potential role that…
All of last week I was thinking that I need to contact one of the most important people in my life — my nanny, Florence Mbuli. Something inside me told me that I needed to contact her and thank her for making me the person I am today. I found out on Sunday morning that…
I have recently been doing some research on the concept of hegemony and the various theoretical models used in political science to analyse this concept. Without boring readers with the various academic arguments and their ideological underpinnings, I have been looking at the role of South Africa in the Southern African region and the foreign…
2010 marks the 60th anniversary of the death of Jan Christiaan Smuts, the JC I was referring to in the title. So far this event seems to have passed by with little interest in the South African media and society. For me Jan Smuts represents a number of things, but if I were to sum…
At the 1870 Berlin Conference, Africa was divided up by the great powers of the day. The borders that were decided were arbitrary in their nature (to put it very politely). As the European powers began the process of decolonisation, so the arbitrary borders in 1870 were kept intact under the principle of International Law…
Right, so the aim of the Media Appeals Tribunal is to (allegedly) assist people who want to take on the media by providing them with a platform with which to seek some form of redress for some hurtful comments or stories that may have been written about them in the media. At present our Law…
If the “brother leader” were to have had his way during his presidency of the AU, Africa would now be one country under the name of the Unites States of Africa with all the trappings of a modern state, including a common currency. Whether the world is ready for another country with the name of…
I don’t want to get into a debate about the evils of the empire so let’s put all of that aside for a moment (well, for the length of this blog post at least). As modern phraseology goes, “let’s park that idea” or “let’s deal with that offline”. However, I would like to deal with…
