THICK END OF THE WEDGE: Zuma may be frozen but implacable history rolls on
I REMEMBER the 1960s, when I’d come home from school to lunch. The talk was, as it still is, politics. The National Party had taken SA out of the Commonwealth. God Save the Queen no longer played at the end of the bioscope. My parents were incensed, but there had also been a murder near the Bashee Bridge on the N2, close enough to our Umtata home for my dad to buy a gun. The murders had been carried out by Poqo, an armed wing then of the Pan Africanist Congress. The response was swift and brutal."We might hate the Nats," friends would say, "but thank God they’re there." That same sentiment has an echo today. By then the Nats had been in power around 20 years. The ’70s were about to happen. Soweto, Biko. Mass unrest. The Nats were in power, but they were already losing control.Just as the ANC is losing control now, 20 years into power and with technology rapidly speeding up change. In just the past week, the rand has gone on the slide, universities and schools are being burned, a der...
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