The securocrat’s guide to literary criticism

A couple of years ago I read the secret reports the Security Police had sent about me to the Minister of Justice, and recently a friend let me have copies of his, which he had scanned to PDF files. The overall impression one gets from reading them is the banality of evil. Occasionally there are [...]

Xenophobia is not over

It’s all very well for Thabo Mbeki to say that xenophobia isn’t cool and that it’s not what the founders of our freedom had in mind and that it’s all over now and everyone can go back to their communities, and anyway it was all stirred up by criminal elements.
But what has been stirred up [...]

How serious are we about fighting crime?

Arthur Goldstuck writes about the problems experienced by a schoolgirl whose Facebook account was hacked, and the reluctance of Facebook to deal with the problem.
However, when there is a clear violation of one user’s rights, surely the balance of rights tilts away from the perpetrator and towards the victim? If someone vandalises your car in [...]

School’s shock over killings suspect

A new twist in the muti-killing case I reported on my other blog — one of the accused is a schoolboy, and it has shocked his teachers and fellow pupils. But while there have been such cases before, this time there have been 18 murders in five months, in a village, which sets it [...]

A case of conscience

Just over a month ago Maria and Mapuli Nduli were murdered in their home at Stinkwater in Tshwane by robbers. One of them had a child at school who was left an orphan.
A few days ago a man came to Girlie Shivambo, half-sister of the murdered women, and told her he could not sleep at [...]

Squeezel? Squeeza? What does it mean?

There’a new word going around, and I’m wondering what it means. It’s “squeezel” or “squeeza”, or at least sounds something like that.
Can someone who actually uses the word tell me what they mean by it.
The first time I heard it was about 3 years ago, when a woman was mugged crossing a railway line near [...]

British motorway closed for crime scene investigation

A British motorway has been closed for a murder investigation after a biker was shot over the weekend.
I’m struck by the thoroughness of the investigation. I can’t imagine the South African police investigating a crime as thoroughly as this, even murder. Imagine the N1 or N3 being closed like that. Perhaps that is why [...]

George Bizos: Odyssey to freedom

I’ve just finished reading George Bizos’s autobiography, Odyssey to freedom.
Actually it’s not so much an autobiography as a record of his court cases. Apart from the first hundred pages, which deal with his boyhood in Greece, and escape from the German occupation in a leaky boat with his father and seven New Zealand soldiers, most [...]

Mobilising against crime

The Minister of Defence, Mosiuoa Lekota, met a group of about 30 religious leaders today to talk about mobilising against crime. He brought with him a couple of representatives of Business Against Crime (BAC), Derek Cooper and Siphiwe Nizimande.
We need to expand partnership, Lekota said — it should not just be government and business, but [...]

Pretoria 4 hours from Johannesburg

I’ve always been puzzled by Americans saying that one place is so many hours away from another, instead of mentioning the distance.
On that reckoning, and today’s experience, Pretoria is 4 hours away from Johannesburg. I left Yeoville at 3:30 pm after teaching a class, and had arranged to fetch my wife from work at [...]