Holding power to account
If you play a word association game with a South African, you can put good money down that four times out of five, the response to ‘Nigerian’ will be either ‘drug dealer’, ‘makwerekwere’, ‘criminal’, or some version of the above. Essentially, negative.… Read more
This tale of doom and resilience by Alistair MacKay follows three queer friends who must navigate climate collapse as their world unravels. Cape Town’s elite has fled to The Citadel, a temperature-controlled dome on Signal Hill where the citizens live in virtual reality, blind to what’s around them.… Read more
Intimate, is one way to describe Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You.
There are only four characters: close friends Alice and Eileen, and the men with whom they are each intertwined, being Felix and Simon respectively.
Alice is a wildly successful young novelist – much like Rooney herself – and has returned to Ireland after a nervous breakdown in New York, what with the demands of book signings and talks and the social circuit expectations success brings.… Read more
This may be the central question of Colson Whitehead’s tenth novel, Harlem Shuffle. The world is Harlem, the person is Raymond Carney, who, as Whitehead dryly describes him, “was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked”.… Read more
Thousands of police-issue guns – the made-in-South-Africa 9mm Z88 – have been sold to Cape Town gangs since the mid-2000s to early 2015. The flood of guns to gangs saw the murder rate in the city climb from a low of about 41 per 100,000 people in 2009, to about 63 per 100,000 by 2015.… Read more
The authors are both millionaires thanks to their successful digital entrepreneurship. Ali created the startup Just Eat, which was an early version of Uber Eats. Kubba made his fortune through Search Engine Optimisation, ending up earning himself passive income and travelling the world.… Read more
The subtitle to this book is ‘The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare’, which deftly explains its contents. Rid spills out the guts of what the Russian spies were up to, as well as the Americans, although by Rid’s account, the Russians were fare more active in spreading disinformation against the West, and more dastardly.… Read more
Expecting a child, Safran Foer investigates what is best for his family to eat. His calmly and insightfully narrated quest leads us to the horrors of the meat production chain. We encounter a brutally sick system in which pigs and chickens are bred stacked in factories which would kill you within half-an-hour if the ventilation system cut out.… Read more
Then there are books that insert themselves months afterwards, at odd, idle, or occasionally opportune moments. … Read more