It was well after midnight on a summer’s night in 1983. I was 22 and taking a well-earned break from training for the Comrades Marathon. The movie The Last Waltz was playing in the almost empty hall at the Bozzoli Sports Pavillion at Wits University. It was the tail end of some university gathering and …
Image by Carola68 Pixabay.com My university maths tutor was an island of sanity, integrity and courage in the frightening, dangerous days of apartheid and he remains such an island in these sadly now treacherous times that we find ourselves in today. It was his eyes I remember best, carefully watching us through his glasses as …
Image by Carola68 Pixabay.com Poetry speaks to us all in different ways and through its beauty resonates with the multiplicity of our experiences. Poetry must find you; and the way poems find you is through other people — and that’s the adventure of it. Poetry to me has always been a form of travel. I …
Poetry is a gift, a boon bestowed on us by the small and big connections of our lives Read More »
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 80 years ago and the madness of World War 2 are never-forgotten reminders that democracy and freedom are not the natural order of any society. We in South Africa have learnt now for certain what millions across the globe learnt 80 years ago – …
Photo by Алесь Усцінаў from Pexels The Ukrainians’ determined, courageous and principled fight against Russian greed and aggression will come to define the meaning of liberty for the 21st century. And it will be because they largely chose to allow the freedom for the truth to be sought and told. The shell whistled over the …
The First Casualty of War is Truth – and Humanity is Close Behind Read More »
As a brutal war rages in Europe, this writer considers what South Africa’s own violent history reflects to the wider world about reconciliation and even redemption. I have been haunted by this image for months: an old man in an ill-fitting, pale blue shirt and flapping khaki pants, wearing a grey woollen beanie on his …
Reconciliation and redemption: The old man and the dark shadow of the past Read More »
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved. By Hamilton Wende and Niamh Kennedy, CNN CNN — South Africa has passed the peak of its Omicron outbreak, according to one of the country’s top scientific researchers. The country has “surpassed the peak of the Omicron wave now, driven by the …
South Africa has Passed its Omicron Outbreak Peak, Top Researcher Says Read More »