After toasting the New Year at a farm in the starkly beautiful wine country near Cape Town, we arrived back in the city to see Table Mountain illuminated (finally!) from below–and a ring of fire on neighboring Devil’s Peak. The
The past two weeks in South Africa have provided an opportunity for me to catch up with local politics. From afar, it has often looked quite petty, as personality conflicts and the peculiar Kremlinology of the ANC capture national attention.
My friend Vicky Ntozini was a successful township entrepreneur until she was murdered last year by her husband. After reading online that her children were still running her bed and breakfast in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, I decided to
On Friday evening, I visited a cousin whose home was a regular refuge for me during my seven years here in Cape Town. He and his family live in a delightful house that they built themselves in the windy neighborhood
In this morning’s Cape Times, Minister Trevor Manuel–formerly the well-regarded Minister of Finance under Thabo Mbeki, now serving in Jacob Zuma’s cabinet–published an op-ed that fully repudiated the views expressed earlier in the week by the ruling party’s provincial leader,
At a dinner party last night, a black acquaintance ribbed me about my former boss, Tony Leon, who once led the Democratic Alliance (DA) from political obscurity to opposition dominance. Why was Tony involving himself in party affairs, this gentleman
Boxing Day, December 26, is traditionally a day for black and “coloured” (i.e. mixed-race) South Africans to head to the nation’s beaches. That tradition has remained strong, twenty years after apartheid, even though the segregation laws that helped foster the
Cape Town’s summer weather brings hazards in the form of the southeast wind, which spreads fires quickly. In addition to the brush fires–some natural, some human-caused–that tear across the landscape, there are also shack fires that can devastate the city’s
For only the second time in eight days, the infernal southeast breeze that blusters throughout the Cape Town summer has stopped for a few hours, allowing the heat of the early morning to sink in. It is early Christmas Day,
It’s been four years since I spent time in Cape Town, and seven years since I came back to the U.S. The city has come a long way since then. Amidst stories of crisis and decline in the country as
South Africans are up in arms about their national cricket team’s decision, with victory within reach, to accept a draw with the visiting Indian squad rather than risk a loss, which would have put the two-match series out of reach.
One of the top news stories in South Africa this week has been the controversy over new allegations that Nelson Mandela received training from Israel’s Mossad spy agency–albeit inadvertently–when he received military training in Ethiopia in 1962. After the then-banned
In Monday morning’s Cape Times, Songezo Mjongile, the provincial secretary of the African National Congress (ANC), took to the op-ed page to defend the Times‘ firing of editor Alide Dasnois. His article ran alongside that of a “Black Consciousness” professor,
While in South Africa, I’ve been enjoying Anton Harber’s excellent Diepsloot, an exploration of life in a teeming informal settlement north of Johannesburg that did not exist when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison but has since become one of
Press freedom has been a major issue in post-apartheid South Africa, especially since 2000, when President Thabo Mbeki and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) launched a campaign against the media, accusing it of racism. In fact, the media’s main
If the United States is a melting pot, South Africa is a potpie kos–a stew of different ingredients that never quite lose their distinctiveness, even while blending together in the same dish. For a variety of reasons–some good, some bad–South Africans
There are many immediate, practical differences about South Africa that strike an American visitor. Driving on the left is one: the hard part is not so much staying on your side of the road as adjusting to the physical dimensions
When I worked as a speechwriter for the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) in the South African parliament, it emerged that despite controlling just over 12% of the seats, the DA asked something like 70% of the questions in the legislature
The Obama administration has had a profound effect on the U.S.-Israel relationship, with implications for the future of the region as a whole. Overall, President Barack Obma has overseen the emergence of a more unstable and dangerous environment for Israel
As a corollary to my earlier post about crime in South Africa, it is only proper to point out another element of the South African national character that coexists, both tragically and ironically, alongside this society’s more violent tendencies: extraordinary
We arrived in South Africa yesterday morning on a beautiful, and typical, Cape Town summer’s day: clear blue skies, a cloud gently brushing Table Mountain and a stiff southeast breeze ripping through everything except the harbor. (It blew away the
What is the purpose of an opposition? It is easier to explain, in the context of great ideological battles, why it is best to side with a struggling minority rather than a powerful majority. But it is less clear what
I’m in transit from Los Angeles to Cape Town, and with a long layover in Paris, I’ve managed to push through an old opposition manual–from the far-left: Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, the 2006
Nelson Mandela has been laid to rest. And with his burial in his ancestral homeland, the new South Africa has truly begun. No longer can it enjoy the “Madiba magic” of its charismatic transitional leader. No longer will it be
Fake sign language interpreter Thamsanqa Jantjie, who “translated” for President Barack Obama and other world leaders at the memorial for former South African president Nelson Mandela last week, admitted to South Africa’s Sunday Times that he had been part of a vigilante mob that
Iran has already achieved a major coup in negotiations with the P5+1 (the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Russia, and China) by winning the fact of, if not the right to, nuclear enrichment. Now it is out to eliminate all of
The Obama administration is attempting to create a new rule that would legalize the abuses of power that it committed during the IRS scandal, when Tea Party and conservative non-profit groups were targeted. The Treasury has proposed a new rule
South Africa’s eNews Channel Africa revealed today that Thamisanqa Jantjie, the fake sign language interpreter who famously stood near President Barack Obama and other world leaders during the Mandela memorial, had faced charges of “rape (1994), theft (1995), housebreaking (1997),
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), has effectively declared war against the conservative members of the GOP caucus, as well as the Tea Party and other outside conservative groups. Not only did he attack outside groups twice in as
The editor of the Cape Times, the leading English-language morning paper in the South African coastal city of Cape Town, has been fired after declining to lead last Friday’s coverage with the story of the death of Nelson Mandela, the
Fake sign language interpreter Thamsanqa Jantjie told a local radio station on Wednesday: “I’ve been interpreting for the quite number of events. And then now–I’m very sad now, because they are the ones who are supposed to protect me….They are supposed
South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has spent twenty years enthusiastically blurring the boundary between the ruling party and the state. It has appointed cronies (“cadres”) to every office, taken over all independent state institutions, enriched itself
I find myself in rare agreement with Ta-Nehisi Coates on the question of violence as a political tactic, which has been debated in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s passing. Coates notes that “Americans should understand” that “violent resistance to tyranny”
South Africans gave positive reviews to President Barack Obama’s speech at the memorial for Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg on Tuesday. The popular local cartoonist Zapiro (a.k.a. Jonathan Shapiro) drew Obama capturing the essence of the man, drawing South Africa’s own
Thamsanqa Jantjie, the fake sign language interpreter whose performance at the memorial to Nelson Mandela on Tuesday sparked international outrage and national embarrassment, lashed out against his critics in an interview with local radio station Highveld 94.7 on Wednesday, saying
In pushing the case for war with Syria in September, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that the majority of rebels were “moderates,” and not Islamists. Three months later, the top “moderate” general, Salim Idris, was pushed out of the
Illinois reported only 7,043 enrollments in Obamacare in the first two months of the program, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Chicago Tribune reports. The eventual goal is 300,000 Illinois enrollments. The actual number of Illinois residents
One of the main arguments that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is using in favor of the budget deal struck with Sen. Patti Murray (D-WA) is that the next wave of sequester cuts under the Budget Control Act would hurt the
Some influential Senate Democrats are folding on new Iran sanctions under pressure from the Obama administration, giving tacit endorsement to a faulty nuclear deal with Iran that accepts nuclear enrichment by the regime–a position recently unthinkable, and against UN Security
Officials in the Obama administration have admitted privately that Israel was correct about the value of sanctions relief in the deal on Iran’s nuclear program struck in Geneva last month, according to Ha’aretz. In defending the deal at the time,