South Africa
Forty years on, the furore over Paul Simon’s Graceland seems almost quaint
The accusations of plagiarism and musical thievery that have dogged the album since its release pale beside OpenAI’s copyright violations
South Africa now has its answer to ICE
A force of 10,000 inspectors is being recruited to weed out foreigners: door-to-door across the nation, they will check mines,…
Smashing South Africa’s last relationship taboo
Cape Town As a young FT stringer in Dar es Salaam in the 1980s, I used to hang out with…
Death and glory: the politics of the World Cup
The choice of ‘tiny boiling Qatar’ as a venue in 2022 – where thousands of construction workers lost their lives – typifies Fifa’s cynical favour-auctioning, says Simon Kuper
The dark heart of South Africa’s Expropriation Act
Cape Town How damaging will South Africa’s Expropriation Act be? The legislation, which allows the state to seize private property…
South Africa dreams of a black Christmas
It’s 38C outside and I’m in a Johannesburg hypermarket owned by the Pick n Pay chain, one of the biggest…
‘When a work lands the excitement is physical’: William Kentridge interviewed
Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe.…
Afrikaners have been endlessly maligned
This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an…
The day I met a sun priest
Palomino, Colombia I’m in a truly wonderful place: the Caribbean coast of Colombia. It’s got more bird species than most…
Why South Africans lost faith in the ANC
A red dawn had just broken when Stephanie Sathege joined the queue to vote at her local polling station in…
Will South Africa reject the ANC?
After many years in power, a corrupt and inept government is finally close to being removed. There is no great…
From Cleopatra to Elizabeth Taylor, women have found jewels irresistible
Helen Molesworth has produced a magnificent history of gemstones – their symbolism, provenance, and the legends surrounding the best ones
It will be difficult for Israel to ignore this ICJ ruling
Yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an interim ruling on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Its decision…
Hate speech
South Africa’s new villain
From she-devil to heroine
Jonny Steinberg describes Nelson and Winnie’s doomed marriage, and how their posthumous reputations have undergone a startling reversal
The Zulu’s new king brings peace, for a moment
A new king of the Zulu was crowned at the weekend. Thousands in South Africa went to Durban to watch…
A world apart
William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it,…
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
Voices of the veld
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
Smoke and mirrors
I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…
Airport officials are on a power trip
On my 2 p.m. arrival for a week-long work trip to South Africa a fortnight ago, an immigration agent flapped…
Is Omicron now falling in South Africa?
Man makes Covid predictionsand God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is…
