The Southern African Litigation Centre has submitted a dossier to South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), calling on it to investigate, with a view to prosecuting, senior Zimbabwean police officials who have allegedly committed crimes against humanity by using torture against those they believe to oppose the government.
How much is black economic empowerment (BEE) political patronage rather than a rational political programme to redistribute assets? Two recent BEE deals have thrown the issue into stark relief. One is the pending R7,5-billion Vodacom BEE deal, writes Reg Rumney.
He has been dubbed Europe’s last dictator. He is known for jailing his political enemies, closing down theatre productions, and presiding — in the words of one opposition leader — over a "horrible" regime. But Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s autocratic President, has come up with a solution to overcome his pariah status.
Award-winning Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou — a previous winner of the Sub-Saharan Africa Literary Prize and the Prix Renaudot — has been hailed by a French journal as a writer to watch out for in this century. Percy Zvomuya is impressed by the English translation of Mabanckou’s <i>African Psycho</i>.
The <i>Guardian</i> was something of a legend in the anti-apartheid struggle. James Zug admirably brings out its complexity in his well-written and highly engaging book <i>The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper</i> (Unisa Press and Michigan State University Press).
"I came to <i>The Bad Girl</i> by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber and Faber) with the memory of <i>The Feast of the Goat</i>, Llosa’s searing portrayal of ageing Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo and the last days of his regime, so I could be forgiven for high expectations."
Mcebisi Ndletyana’s book <i>African Intellectuals in 19th and Early 20th Century South Africa</i> is an attempt to present a history of the accumulation of knowledge capital among black South Africans. Yunus Momoniat looks at figures who were builders of an intellectual, moral and political infrastructure in South Africa.
The inspiration for Angolan Ondjaki’s book <i>The Whistler</i> could easily have been the avant-garde duo of Zimbabwe’s Dambudzo Marechera and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, acolytes of Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, writes Percy Zvomuya.
A reticent, opaque man who seldom reveals what he is thinking or feeling is how author Jonny Steinberg describes the central character in his latest book, <i>Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey through a Great Epidemic</i> (Jonathan Ball). Belinda Beresford meets Steinberg.
Unexpected good fortune might yet result from the Eskom shenanigans, debacle or tragedy (you choose). One might even think publishers knew what was coming as more than 50 novels, in English, by local authors were published last year. Jane Rosenthal takes a closer look.