apartheid
Afrikaners have been endlessly maligned
This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an…
Afrikaner angst: Cato Pedder goes in search of her ancestors
As a descendant of Jan Smuts, Pedder is Afrikaner aristocracy. But she finds the legacy increasingly problematic while researching the lives of her female forebears
From she-devil to heroine – Winnie Mandela’s surprising metamorphosis
Jonny Steinberg describes Nelson and Winnie’s doomed marriage, and how their posthumous reputations have undergone a startling reversal
Homage to Sydney Kentridge, South Africa’s courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
My fans say I could have won the Nobel – if it wasn’t for the bizarre sex
The family ranch, which my father acquired when I was about six years of age, lay along the banks of…
Death and retribution in Beersheba
Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist…
A glimpse of an older, kinder Chelsea
The Parish Church of St Luke in Sydney Street, Chelsea, is enormous. Vaguely reminiscent of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, it…
An innocent abroad defies South Africa’s insane colour code
At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place,…
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…
