16 November 2022 Eight Billion and Counting By Gwynne Dyer I must have missed the memo, because there was no newborn baby picked out at random last Tuesday to be the designated eight billionth human being. Perhaps they finally realised how tacky that journalistic device was, or maybe they just got tired of nagging us. …
20 June 2022 South Africa: How Did Ramaphosa Get So Rich? By Gwynne Dyer Once upon a time (about four years ago) Cyril Ramaphosa was seen as South Africa’s last, best hope. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the leadership of the country’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) had passed from the wise and …
25 April 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Tropical Storm Ana in January, Tropical Cyclone Batsirai in February, then Dumako, Emnati and Gombe in quick succession: three cyclones and two ‘tropical storms’ in six weeks hitting the coasts of south-east Africa. Then Cyclone Idai in late March, which practically destroys the city of Beira in Mozambique, killing …
First there was ‘Macbeth’, the Shakespeare play (1606). It’s a bloody play even by Shakespeare’s demanding standards, with Lady Macbeth as the chief inciter to violence. Then there’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, a short novel by Nikolai Leskov (1865) that was later turned into an opera by Shostakovich. This Lady Macbeth is called Katerina, and …
The peculiar thing about the ‘peace deal’ between Israelis and Palestinians that was announced in Washington on Tuesday was obvious at a single glance. There was President Donald Trump and his good buddy Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, together at the podium, and an audience of US and Israeli officials who clapped at every …
17 December 2013 Nelson Mandela: Peace at Last By Gwynne Dyer The Catholic Church consecrates saints with less pomp and sentimentality than was lavished on Nelson Mandela during the week-long media orgy that we have just been through. We haven’t seen such a ridiculous spectacle since…oh, since the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John …
15 September 2013 Rape is an African Problem By Gwynne Dyer Last May, with considerable trepidation, I wrote an article about what seemed to be extraordinarily high rates of rape in Africa. The original data came from a study by South Africa’s Medical Research Council in 2009 which found that more than a quarter of …
13 June 2013 Mandela’s Legacy By Gwynne Dyer As I write this Nelson Mandela is still with us. He may even still be living at the end of this year. But this is his fourth hospitalisation in six months, and the prognosis for 94-year-old men with persistent lung infections is not good. How will South …
22 May 2013 An African Iceberg? By Gwynne Dyer Keeping a file of random clippings is an old-fashioned thing to do, but sometimes it offers you unexpected connections. Sometimes it’s a connection that you don’t even want to see. But there it is, so what are you going to do about it? In June, 2009, …
20 August 2012 South Africa: The Politics of Massacre By Gwynne Dyer Forty-eight hours after South African police killed 34 striking miners last Thursday (16 August), Julius Malema showed up at the Lonmin platinum mine north of Johannesburg to assign the blame. “President Zuma said to the police they must act with maximum force,” Malema …