It was a daring mission; unprecedented in its audacity and ferocity. At 04.37am, the precision missiles were launched from an unpiloted aircraft flying somewhere over the Ozurenje valley. They swiftly streaked through the fading darkness at almost tw...
Jacob Zuma has never been a man who aroused any pride in me as a citizen of this country; nor has he inspired much confidence in me to impose the trust of leadership on his shoulders. There are those who without a degree of hesitation would give an a...
I spent election day driving around KwaZulu-Natal visiting polling stations both in Durban and Zululand. I started early and headed north to Ulundi and then onwards to Nongoma before making my way back to Durban stopping at various polling stations a...
The sight must have been amusing and alarming: a tall, young Chinese man doing a flying kung fu kick and bouncing off my back. He then dashed off and I was rather relieved. The Chinese government takes a dim view of public scuffles; we could well hav...
“My father and them trekked with a donkey cart”, Floors explained. “It was a long distance to cover in that way and some families had it very hard. Somebody's wife went into labour and they stopped at a farm. But the farmer wanted to know nothi...
Isn't it a paradox that Africa, a continent heavily mired in "famine", regularly surpasses global agricultural exports, according to WTO, and other trade statistics?
Or that the 13 African countries superceding agricultural growth in the past five...
The 11 000-page Commodity Futures Modernisation Act was dumped on Congress just days before Christmas break on December 21 2000. Those who read it would have foreseen years in advance the black hole on page 262, forbidding government from regula...
I start with a rather reactionary title that will not make many people happy as they fought against Apartheid or knew people that died during the anti-Apartheid struggle. My point is not that Apartheid should have been allowed to continue, but that ...
Marshall McLuhan predicted a Global Village of interdependence based on new communication technology in the 1960s. Since then the concept has taken on new connotations with the advent of the internet and its assumed ubiquitous. However, the negativ...
Africa Addio was an Italian documentary shot in the 1960s that showed Africa as a land filled with savagery and ruination as colonial powers withdrew (by Jacopetti and Prosperi, 1966). The book that accompanied the film was somewhat sympathetic to t...
