Going back to my routes: Finding a way to call Jo'burg home

When I was a boy in the 1970s I used to play a game I have retroactively called "Dispatcher". I would dispatch imaginary couriers.

Aids, lies and dissidents

Like many people,Ronald Suresh Roberts may think Thabo Mbeki's dissident views on Aids "flat earth crap".

Arms: How Mbeki meddled

There is strong evidence that the deposed president undermined the investigation into South Africa’s arms procurement.

Political books go pop

South Africans search for bookish answers in a time of political doubt, writes Nosimilo Ndlovu.

A stunted af(fair)

If the Cape Town Book Fair is to mean something beyond an exercise in retailing it needs to seize opportunities to be unique, writes Darryl Accone.

Affairs of the heart

Mark Gevisser, creative force behind two current exhibitions about gay life, writes about the dynamics of putting love on show today.

Mugabe's good son

Imagine if Thabo Mbeki were as brave and as articulate as Barack Obama. Imagine if he were able to say about Robert Mugabe, as Obama did about his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, that while he disagreed with him, he would not renounce him: "As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me."

Won the state, lost the party

There is a moment when you can sense the power draining away, when a point of no return has been reached and passed. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is facing that moment now in Britain, as a sense of staleness, sleaze and incompetence overwhelms his government.

Journalist demands apology from Gevisser

Journalist Charlene Smith on Friday demanded a public apology from Mark Gevisser, author of the book Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, saying he had published "serious inaccuracies". She was referring to an article by her, published in the Washington Post, that Gevisser quoted in his biography of Mbeki.

Fishing for clues in the ruling party's stream

At last Mark Gevisser's long-awaited biography of Thabo Mbeki is out. For a project that began in 1999 and took eight years to complete, the title The Dream Deferred seems especially apt. As a subject, Mbeki is a walking "writer's block". Not only is he a densely complex person, as the book confirms, but he shimmers in the light, making it all but impossible to have a single thesis to explain the man.

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