Thought Leader

It’s on, it’s cootchy-coo. No, it’s off, it’s divorce. Monitoring South Africa’s governing alliance is a bit like watching a low-grade soapie starring a fractious married couple. Or more accurately, an eternally bickering ménage à trois, with two parties always ganging up on the third, but with loyalties shifting constantly. Sometimes it is the African…

By Melo Magolego The deafening umbrage surrounding the DA’s use of Mandela in DA posters makes me curious. What has made people so flustered about the appropriation of the Mandela brand by the DA? I find reasons focusing on the veracity and accuracy of the claims about the track record of Helen Suzman wholly uninteresting….

Imagine yourself as a youth in the June 1976 Soweto riots. You are young and you have dreams; selfish dreams about yourself as a free man (or woman) and a full citizen of a free nation. Desperation, pain and death surround you. You realise that you have only two options: freedom or death. Death, in…

The DA has recently launched a poster campaign entitled “Know Your DA”. It attempts, I think, to bring to light the “untold” role that some of their founding members played in the fight against apartheid. Typical of South African politics, supporters of opposition parties countered these claims with a series of spoof posters, intent on revealing…

In the four general elections held in post-apartheid South Africa, the African National Congress obtained the lion’s share of the vote, always garnering more than 62%, and an even bigger slice of votes from black South Africans. The Democratic Alliance’s 2014 election campaign has already kicked off, with its characterisation of the ruling party a…

Who cares about the rights of Mr Mandela and Mrs Suzman? It’s all about the rights of politicians to brand themselves to death. Let me say this loud and clear. I am sorry in advance for having so little respect for politicians everywhere. Mostly, I am sorry because we are landed with them, these public-relations…

In 1963 Bram Fischer stood before a court and said “the defence … will show that the ANC is a broad national movement, embracing all classes of Africans within its ranks, and having the aim of achieving equal political rights for all South Africans”. Fischer was the lead defence counsel in the well-known Rivonia Trial…

I have a friend and she is one of those annoyingly smart people. She always says the right thing, knows the right thing and does the right thing. She has learnt to be very sure of her own opinion and nobody likes her. Not even me. What has this got to do with you? Nothing,…

When it comes to renaming things, government suddenly gets goal-oriented. In fact, I’m surprised we’re allowed to choose our own names and aren’t given a pre-approved list of politically correct suggestions. But what’s in a name? A lot, if we go through three recent events. The first involves one Supra Mahumapelo, the ANC’s North West…

The imperial ghost is alive and kicking. The big, bad, ugly angel of darkness is gearing-up to roam the streets of South Africa and has apparently found itself an unlikely host … Mamphela Ramphele. The imperial ghost, as you might know is sometimes based in the US, sometimes the UK and sometimes the European Union….