South Africa
It will be difficult for Israel to ignore this ICJ ruling
Yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an interim ruling on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Its decision…
Beware South Africa’s rising star
South Africa’s new villain
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
The Zulu’s new king brings peace, for a moment
A new king of the Zulu was crowned at the weekend. Thousands in South Africa went to Durban to watch…
Brilliant and distinctive but also relentless: William Kentridge, at the RA, reviewed
William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it,…
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…
The lost world of the Karoo
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
A belter of a podcast, featuring a mad South African: Smoke Screen reviewed
I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…
Why I was almost thrown out of South Africa
On my 2 p.m. arrival for a week-long work trip to South Africa a fortnight ago, an immigration agent flapped…
Is Omicron now falling in South Africa?
Man makes Covid predictionsand God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is…
The promise of South Africa
‘Earth has not anything to show more fair.’ One can admire the view from Westminster Bridge and feel near the…
How 19th-century gold rushes led to a distrust of China
For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary…
Letters: Why aren’t Italians fighting for their liberty?
Wage concern Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s call for higher wages to end the shortage of British HGV drivers (‘Your country…
Letters: The problem with the ‘alpha migrants’
Here illegally Sir: Unfortunately, Charlotte Eagar misses the point (‘The alpha migrants’, 31 July). The Channel migrants may be ‘bright…
The case for travelling abroad
I’m off. In the week when you may read this, my partner and I will be winging our way to…
The real reasons for South Africa’s riots
Sixty-eight years ago, when I was four, my Scottish father and English mother took me from London to South Africa,…
Death and dishonour: The Promise, by Damon Galgut, reviewed
If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But…
What's behind the South African riots?
South Africa is ablaze once more. In the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal (formerly Natal) and Gauteng (which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria),…
Memories of Stellenbosch and South Africa’s finest wines
Lockdown provides time to think, and to reminisce. A South African friend, trapped in Amsterdam, phoned the other day. Had…
Prue Leith: My carbon footprint should put me in jail
I made the mistake of saying I thought insects might help feed the world. They are high-protein, cheap to farm…
Death in the Cape – the lonely fate of Mary Kingsley
What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century…
A terrific two-hander that belongs at the National: RSC's Kunene and the King reviewed
The Gift is three plays in one. It opens in a blindingly white Victorian parlour where a posh lady, Sarah,…
