Articles By This Author

Why is racism bad?

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With good reason, few things are more affronting to humans, universally, than being misjudged by their appearance, by some superficial feature they know can only

Freedom Day: making a meal of it

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With a gut-feel logic that it usually seems impolite to question, it is often suggested that the poor, the needy, the jobless, “can’t eat the

Expropriation Act: deepening the deficiency

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This piece, written in response to two articles published in the first week in February, was offered to, but not published by, the Mail &

Turning the page

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Adam Hochschild, best known perhaps for his 1998 book on Congo’s colonial catastrophe, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial

How can we tell civilisation from barbarism?

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“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” These words, in German and in Catalan, appear

Our tormenting myth

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At first glance, the watchers in the photograph are rather like us; outsiders looking in. Even without being able to see their faces, we can

To see liberty thrive

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I suspect the main reason why liberalism is so much stronger and more enduring than the fiercer (and all too often indistinguishable) ideologies to its

Mistaking the ‘Malema’ risk: a reply to Martin van Staden

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This is really a reflection on the virtue of being less than wholly convincing, or convinced, and thus avoiding the penalty of bringing the argument

A worrying obstacle on the road to post-ANC recovery

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South Africans who have the most to offer are the very ones the country is most likely to lose to emigration, according to new research.

Trekking on

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The older I get the more I am persuaded that the best reason for monuments is being reminded just how wrong we so often are