Operation Protective Edge
by Paul Wessels. The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, Philip Weiss (Eds) Nation Books, 2011 On Thursday 24 July 2014 I held a readathon of the abridged version of the “Goldstone Report”, at Rhodes University. I sold it as a Mandela Week event to get […]
Licking Dirty Hands
by David Shook. In the tradition of German poet Heimrad Bäcker, who turned quotations from the Holocaust into poetry, French poet Frank Smith has re-appropriated the official Combatant Status Review Tribunal transcripts from Guantanamo Bay, released to The Associated Press by order of a US judge in 2006. Like Bäcker, Smith seeks to emotionalise the de-emotionalised […]
Undoing the Spell
by Ben Verghese. Many of the dominant narratives of the partition focus on events in 1947 – easy-to-caricature leaders, the two-nation theory and the birth of Pakistan. How then do we find ways to duly speak of one land mass being forcibly carved up; of the multiple peoples displaced; of the umpteen lives lost, and uncountable, […]
Men and their Dogs
by Gwen Ansell. Leonardo Padura is perhaps best known outside his native Cuba for his series of prize-winning, Havana-set detective novels, The Four Seasons, featuring the maverick cop and aspiring writer Lieutenant Mario Conde. The weightier and more ambitious Man Who Loved Dogs – it took Padura, he says, more than five years to write – also features an […]
Shooting From Point Blank Range
Moses Serubiri turns on the television and watches the news unfold, in living and often riotous contradiction, in a programme that has viewers from Kampala to Kansas hooked on the hilarity, the spectacle and the harsh reality of Ugandan politics. In an episode of Point Blank, police officers join in watching a carnival of rioting […]