This excerpt is from the recently published book, The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism and Reparations (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2024)
Sazi Bongwe’s branding of the late professor as a ‘villain of apartheid’ and advisor to PW Botha is false, slanderous and unethical
Judge Navi Pillay talks to Athandiwe Saba about being the daughter of a bus driver, a little girl who swore at school, and the pressure of being a leading woman in the world while being a mother at home
Although it is in many ways a prohibitive instrument, particularly in terms of access, the piano offers both simplicity and richness to this songwriter
Professor Salim Abdool Karim talks to Nicolene de Wee about his responsibility as head of the ministerial advisory committee tasked with guiding the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
South African inflation was facing stubborn and persistent external shocks that were helping to drive prices higher, central bank Governor Tito Mboweni said on Thursday. But it would be foolish to change the 3% to 6% inflation target range, he said in a speech at a monetary policy conference in Johannesburg.
South Africa should be prepared to intervene in the foreign exchange market to keep its currency stable and ”competitive”, and should maintain its inflation targets, a group advising the government said. In its report released on Thursday, an international panel — known as the Harvard Group — also suggested a budget surplus of between 1% and 2% to help ease inflation.
Barack Obama was showing signs of campaign fatigue. Sitting on a picnic bench in a park on Pagoda Street, Indianapolis, in discussion with a group of 30 supporters, he told a story about the ”modest” background of himself and his wife, Michelle. And 10 minutes later, seemingly having forgotten, he told them it all again.
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the hallucinogenic drug LSD, has died aged 102, the organisation that republished his book on the mind-altering substance said. Hofmann died at his home in Basel, Switzerland on Tuesday, the California-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies said on its website.
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/ 24 February 2008
The presidential forays of Ralph Nader have turned him into one of the most divisive figures in US politics. Already on Sunday reaction was swift among Democrats to the news that Nader had thrown his hat into the ring to stand in the November election in his fifth tilt at the White House.
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/ 19 February 2008
Looking at the options available to Finance Minister Trevor Manuel when he delivers his national budget in the National Assembly on Wednesday, the experts of the Old Mutual Investment Group reckon that he could have as much as R25-billion to play with. But how would he spend it?
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/ 2 February 2008
With a market value of -billion, Google’s power has become awe-inspiring. Its profits rocketed by 40% to ,2-billion last year and it swallowed the popular video-sharing website YouTube. Through Microsoft’s ,6-billion takeover bid for Yahoo!, the technology establishment hit back at Google’s seemingly unstoppable rise.
”They said this day would never come,” said United States Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama at the outset of his barnstorming victory speech on Thursday night. But as he arrived in New Hampshire early on Friday, Americans woke up to the historic possibility that the day when they might have a black president was closer than they thought.
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/ 29 December 2007
Pakistan was on Saturday gripped by division and uncertainty following the burial of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto as her supporters angrily rejected a government explanation of her death. Bhutto died on Thursday shortly after a suicide attack targeting her vehicle at a campaign rally in the northern city of Rawalpindi.
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/ 28 December 2007
Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest next to her father in the family mausoleum on Friday after the opposition leader’s assassination plunged Pakistan into crisis and triggered violent protests across her native Sindh province. Thousands of mourners wept as Bhutto was carried from her ancestral home in Sindh to the mausoleum.
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/ 28 December 2007
Pakistan pointed a finger on Friday at al-Qaeda for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, as her body was taken to her ancestral home for burial and anger at her death erupted into deadly unrest. The scale of the violence left the nuclear-armed Muslim nation shell-shocked, triggering alarm around the world.
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/ 28 December 2007
The body of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was taken to her family village for burial on Friday, a day after her assassination plunged the nuclear-armed country into one of the worst crises in its 60-year history. Her killing after an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi triggered a wave of violence.
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/ 27 December 2007
Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, slain in a suicide attack in Rawalpindi on December 27, knew very well the risks she ran when she decided to wage a public campaign for the restoration of democracy. Hours after she returned home in October after eight years of self-imposed exile, a suicide bomber killed nearly 150 people in an attack targeting her motorcade.
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/ 22 December 2007
The technology group Apple has come in for criticism after forcing a website dedicated to reporting on the company’s activities to close down. The ThinkSecret site, which published news and rumours about Apple’s forthcoming products, had been locked in a two-year legal battle with the company.
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/ 18 December 2007
This morning, facing too many deadlines, I found my brain blocked. I have been reading all three fat Mandela books, trying to find something to say for a commissioned article. In the midst of my writer’s block I have been searching for a high by following the Obama campaign on the internet and ignoring our own political frenzy here in Kenya, for this time it has no grace.
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/ 17 November 2007
In the first big-screen casualty of the Hollywood writers strike, Columbia Pictures said on Friday it had postponed production on Angels & Demons, a prequel to its box-office hit The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks. The Sony-owned film distributor said the planned release date for the thriller has been pushed back to 2009.
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/ 10 November 2007
Norman Mailer, the pugnacious two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner who was a dominating presence on the United States literary scene across seven decades, died on Saturday of kidney failure, his family said. He was 84. In more than 40 books and a torrent of essays, Mailer provoked and enraged readers with his strident views on US political life and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
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/ 6 November 2007
The looming threat of an untreatable strain of tuberculosis emerging as the disease becomes ever more drug resistant will occupy the minds of about 3Â 000 experts at a conference in Cape Town this week. Though curable, more than 1,5-million people die of tuberculosis every year and growing numbers of patients do not react to standard drugs.
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/ 1 November 2007
United States astronomers have discovered the biggest black hole orbiting a star 1,8-million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, with a record-setting mass of 24 to 33 times that of our Sun, Nasa said on Tuesday. The massive newcomer beats the previous stellar-mass black hole discovered on October 17 in the M33 galaxy that has 16 times the mass of our Sun.
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/ 18 October 2007
Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto ended eight years of self-exile on Thursday, making a comeback that could eventually lead to power sharing with President Pervez Musharraf. ”I am thankful to God, I am very happy that I’m back in my country and I was dreaming of this day,” said a sobbing Bhutto.
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/ 15 October 2007
American economists Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics on Monday for laying the foundations of an economic theory that determines when markets are working effectively. Hurwicz, Russian-born but an American citizen, is 90 years old and is the oldest-ever recipient of a Nobel Prize.
Chancellor Angela Merkel travels to Africa on Wednesday with the message that Germany is keen to step up cooperation with the continent to help combat poverty and disease. The chancellor’s trip to Ethiopia, South Africa and Liberia from October 3 to 7 will focus on economic development, social issues and business ties.
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/ 28 September 2007
Brazil’s march to the final of the Women’s Soccer World Cup final in China is doing far more than just helping the growth of the sport in the South American country where it was once banned by law. A stellar performance by Marta saw Brazil demolish tournament favourites the United States 4-0 in the semifinal on Thursday.
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/ 27 September 2007
Social networking site Facebook, which signs up more than a million new fans every month, has changed tack and begun to list publicly members’ profiles on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. It is, in fact, aiming to get in early in the race to build a global — and potentially lucrative — online people directory.
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/ 27 September 2007
The Burmese junta was on Wednesday night trying to shut down internet and telephone links to the outside world after a stream of blogs and cellphone videos began capturing the dramatic events on the streets. In the past 24 hours observers monitoring the flow of information have noticed a downturn.
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/ 21 September 2007
Take one historic event, add a famous political activist and make it on to the Booker Prize shortlist. Mohsin Hamid speaks to Decca Aitkenhead about his second novel.
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/ 21 September 2007
Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma on Friday embarked on his first foreign trip since taking office this week, heading to neighbouring Guinea and Liberia to promote ties damaged by more than a decade of war. The former insurance executive was sworn in on Monday within hours of being declared winner of a run-off election.