South africa

Friday

Molly Guinness

Is democracy flourishing in South Africa?

This week South Africa has held events to mark 20 years of democracy. Simon Jenkins, writing after the first election that included black people, was deeply moved: Democracy is an unromantic ideology, but the old girl can still draw a tear. I have never witnessed a political event to compare with the South African election, not even the fall of the Berlin Wall. The silent queues snaking for miles across bush and township were mesmeric…Streets that saw gunfights, burnt homes and necklaced corpses were graced with orderly lines in their Sunday best… Twenty-five million blacks got up one morning, and decided to put their faith in democracy. Nobody foretold this.

Thursday

Chris Radmann

I hope and pray that bookshops will survive – somehow

When writing a novel, there comes a time, in the process of gestation and planning, when other books are required. It is almost as though, Middlemarch-like, your little attempt at writing cannot be separated from what others have written. The world is a great web. Books speak to books. They cry out, call, whisper. I find it very strange. When writing a novel, when so much is held in your heart and your head, certain books quietly announce themselves. Usually, I have found, that happens in bookshops – those rapidly-diminishing repositories of paper and card and ink. It is not the same online, on the electronic web. Yes, I know that

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

We’re all just bewildered apes – my financial adviser proves it

Depressed and demoralised after the defeat of his nation of farmers in the second Boer war, Eugène Marais, an Afrikaner patriot, lawyer, naturalist, poet, lifelong morphine addict and journalist, went to live with a troop of baboons in the then remote Waterberg area of South Africa. He camped in their vicinity and was gradually accepted by them and afforded a place in their society. His books about his experiences, My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the Ape, have subsequently made his name as the father of the scientific study of the behaviour of animals. In The Soul of the Ape he proposed a theory of the evolution of

Monday

Lara Prendergast

Why shouldn’t people have a flutter on the Pistorius trial?

You can bet on all manner of scummy things on Paddy Power: when Fergie and Andrew will remarry; how Julian Assange will leave the Ecuadorian embassy (odds for him leaving in a diplomatic bag are currently 20/1). Now you can also bet on the outcome of the Pistorius trial. I’ve got a fiver on the Blade Runner getting off. I jest. But given the extensive coverage lavished on the trial so far, is it any wonder that people are starting to have a flutter. The scrutiny has been astonishing – with live television and radio broadcasts available for anyone who cares. South Africa even has a 24-hour TV channel devoted to coverage

Thursday

The Spectator

Why America’s ivory ban won’t help elephants

The Duke of Cambridge deserves credit for bringing his influence to bear on the growing tragedy of the elephant, whose population is being decimated by poaching. But his advisers should have been quicker to dissuade him from one aspect of his campaign: the threat to dispose of his grandmother’s ivory collection. That Africa’s elephant population is in peril from poachers is not in doubt. Of a total of 400,000 living in the wild, around 50,000 were illegally killed last year, way beyond the numbers which the population could naturally withstand. The future is looking bleak, too, for wild rhino, 1,000 of which were poached in Africa last year out of

Thursday

Michela Wrong

How to get around South Africa’s many boundaries

There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken by the hand and is being gently led down a path by a guide who can be trusted to point out interesting landmarks, allow the odd meander, but always keep firmly on course. Mark Gevisser, who published a praised biography of former South African president Thabo Mbeki a few years ago, is one such, and the metaphor seems apt in view of this book’s title, which comes from a game the author played in childhood. Perched on the back seat of his father’s Mercedes, he would pore over a map

Monday

Alex Massie

A Carve-Up That’s Just Not Cricket

By god, you know matters have come to a wretched pass when you feel inclined to defend and protect the International Cricket Council. And yet, remarkably, such a moment is upon us. Like the old Roman republic, the ICC is threatened by a triumvirate. In this instance, Crassus is represented three times as India, England and Australia bid to carve up cricket’s empire between themselves. Few people doubt change is needed. The ICC has been broken for ages. It is easy to conclude that it has outlived its usefulness. Nevertheless, that does not mean any proposed alternative is going to produce better outcomes for cricket. The proposals for reforming cricket’s

Friday

Ed West

Playing down Australia and New Zealand’s role in the Great War is shameful

Back in the 1950s my grandmother wrote her memoirs of childhood in Edwardian London, a story that ends in the summer of 1914, when she was 14. In contrast to the image we’re given of cheering men skipping to war, she recalls her father in tears at the breakfast table, lamenting that the politicians had failed. He foresaw total disaster (optimism runs in the family). She then finds that her brother has joined up, not out of excitement or glory but because he’s ashamed not to be in uniform; he survived, although broken by shellshock, and his elder son was killed in the next war. It’s clear from her recollection

Tuesday

Rian Malan

What did you do in the struggle, daddy? The real story of Nelson Mandela and the communists

Reading the obituaries last Friday, one was left with impression that Nelson Mandela’s only flaws were fastidiousness and a tendency to flirt with every pretty girl he met. Otherwise, he was exemplary in every respect, and of course a human right activist in the exactly the sense that Western liberals find winsome and cuddly. ‘Flawless,’ said Archbishop Tutu. ‘One of the true giants,’ said Blair.  Even the Tory Cameron could barely contain himself, describing Mandela as ‘the embodiment of grace.’  You had to have sharp ears to hear the discordant note struck by Johannesburg’s Business Day, which a ran a front-page story headlined, ‘South African Communist Party admits Mandela was

Friday

Alex Massie

Nelson Mandela gave us the greatest gift of all: Hope

Sometimes when a significant public figure dies, even, perhaps especially, when that death comes as no surprise and may, indeed, be considered some form of release there is a natural tendency to wonder if the blanket media coverage that invariably follows is altogether appropriate or even seemly. Is it not all too much? A man is merely a man; a woman merely a woman. Sometimes too, it is natural to react to the endless parade of tributes and wonder how genuine they really are. Is there not something vainglorious about them? Is there not something a little ridiculous about all these attempts to cling to the coat-tails of greatness? Perhaps

Thursday

Richard Stengel

Nelson Mandela: The man and the mask

South Africa’s first black president Nelson Mandela has died aged 95 this evening. From The Spectator’s archive, here is a personal account of Nelson Mandela’s character from November 1994. Richard Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Nelson Mandela loves newspapers. He reads them slowly, studying each article, turning the page with unhurried precision. On Robben Island, newspapers were denied him and he still savours them. For most of our flight down to Natal, Mandela was absorbed in the weekend Johannesburg Star. I sat across from him in a cramped and aged four-seat propeller plane. It was April of 1993, and I had been in South Africa for

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux – review

Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper? In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Life among South Africa’s nouveaux riches

Not long ago Cyril Ramaphosa, probably South Africa’s future president and ANC leader, attempted to buy a buffalo. It was at an auction for hunters and game ranchers. He bid £1.3 million and, incredibly, lost out to another tycoon. At the same event he still managed to spend another million pounds on game species for his ranch — but later he apologised in light of the fact that South Africa is a ‘sea of poverty’. One South African who is unapologetic about his bling and conspicuous spending is Kenny Kunene, who famously held a birthday party at his ZAR nightclub in Johannesburg at which guests ate sushi off the body

Wednesday

Peter Guest

Africa’s growth spurt

When South African police opened fire on striking miners at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine, it had all of the hallmarks of the bad old days of the continent – the tangled and violent business of pulling metal from the ground in the “Dark Continent”. The events at Marikana were symptomatic of the fractious politics of labour in South Africa, the uncomfortable alliances forged in the anti-apartheid struggle that have not resolved themselves in peacetime. However, at their root they have the simmering tension caused by the unequal distribution of economic opportunity that is not restricted to South Africa. The mining sector there, and elsewhere in the developing world, is nearly

Tuesday

Martin Plaut

South Africa: Mired in corruption?

On the 5th of August Mary Robinson delivered the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Cape Town. It should have been an occasion when the former Irish President and UN Human Rights Commissioner looked back on South Africa’s achievements since the end of apartheid. Yet her speech will probably be remembered for just one sentence: ‘…the ANC’s moral authority has been eroded, tainted by allegations of corruption; a temporary betrayal of its history.’ From an old friend of the ruling party this was damning indeed, but is she right to refer to corruption as a ‘temporary betrayal?’ The ANC’s history is more complex and more difficult than supporters like Mrs Robinson

Tuesday

J P O'Malley

Racism and real estate

If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate. Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant to come together. But this has not been the case. Instead, residential segregation and city-splitting politics — across the globe — has ensured that by putting a coerced colour-line in place, white-power has remained the definitive norm. Tracing the trajectory of segregationist politics from 1700, to the present day, Nightingale notes that racial segregationists have

Saturday

Michela Wrong

Fear and loathing in the Congo

Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. When the UN peacekeepers made contact — and there was always a risk they would run into Rwandan rebels with very different priorities — his job was to persuade twitchy,

Saturday

Douglas Hurd

Go out and govern New South Wales

‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. ‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. Straight-backed, grey-haired, he had the bright eye and bristled moustache of an ageing fox-terrier.’ Reading this, at the beginning of a chapter, we cannot be sure whether what follows will be Lytton Strachey or John Buchan. The tale might go either way. The letter might be either an invitation to shoot grouse or in answer to a summons to cope with a crisis threatening the British empire. The second guess would be right. The letter was

Saturday

Justin Cartwright

When the best defence is no defence

This remarkable book is the account by their lawyer of the trial, imprisonment and sentencing to death in the late Eighties of a group of young men who came to be known as the Delmas Four. It is also a wonderfully vivid and at times alarming account of the inner workings both of ANC ‘operations units’ and of the police, who used torture, murder and intimidation without compunction in the fight to save South Africa from what they saw as a communist threat. As South Africans in general drew closer to some sort of détente between the ANC and the nationalist government, neither the ANC on the one hand nor

Monday

Daniel Korski

A flooded world

It looks like the opening of a Hollywood disaster film. The South African government has declared parts of the country disaster areas, after 40 people died in floods in a month. At the same time, the UN is to launch an appeal for emergency flood aid for Sri Lanka, where at least 32 people have died and more than 300,000 have been displaced. Meanwhile flood waters in Australia have left a trail of destruction, at least 18 dead and a billion dollar bill for reconstruction. And in Brazil, survivors of the floods that have killed more than 600 people are frustrated by the lack of government help. Are these floods