Thomas Johnson - The Blog

I like crime detection novels. It's my main form of light reading. However, I tend to read from a select few writers and rarely leave that comfort zone – James Lee Burke, who's lately off his game, John Grisham, etc – so-called best-selling authors. While there are a few South African crime writers, I've seldom been interested to explore beyond the confines of my narrow circle. It's part familiarity with the known and part unwilling to try new authors. But Cape Town Afrikaans writer Deon Meyer is one I've read from time to time. I dropped him a few years ago out of an intense irritation then with his misrepresentation of the social and historical context of Cape Town's brown community, otherwise known as "coloureds". To be exact, it wasn't a misrepresentation in the body of the novel per se, but his, his publisher's or translator's historically outdated and incorrect description, one harking from the apartheid-era, of them in the ...

In a decision on 8 March 2019 the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has dismissed the FW de Klerk Foundation's November 2016 complaint against EFF leader Julius Malema that his white slaugher comments did not constitute hate speech. Malema said: “White people found peaceful Africans here. They killed them. They slaughtered them like animals. We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now. What we are calling for is the peaceful occupation of land and we don’t owe anyone an apology for that.”  This is legal and political finessing. Had the roles been reversed - a white making those comments about blacks - the SAHRC would have immediately found it racist and hateful, and not taken over two years to do it. There is a perception the SAHRC is obsessed by white-on-blacks racism and alleged racism, is not independent and too tuned into the country's ANC and EFF-led political narrative of black victimisation. This decision confirm...

In his latest statement DA leader Mmusi Maimane says, "A decade of DA delivery in Western Cape shows what is possible under clean, capable government". He mentions DA-run Johannesburg's alleged "job creation" numbers and at the end, "Highlights from Premier Helen’s Zille’s Western Cape State of the Province Address", which include his and DA's repeated, problematic and false assertion the DA in the Western Cape (WC) "created" hundreds of thousands of "new" jobs. From Zille's address: "508 000 new jobs have been created in the WC since the start of the administration’s first term." Maimane previously used a figure of 487 000 (2018), recently DA MP Geordin Hill-Lewis 640 000 and now Zille 508 000. Hill-Lewis cites a speech Zille gave a year ago for his. Their figures differ - presumably from the same source - Zille - and none are verified or from an authority. At best it's Zille's and Maimane's an...