Litnet

"The lesson of history is clear: When political anxieties dictate who may speak, the marketplace of ideas collapses. Every writer’s freedom suffers, not just that of the one targeted."

"For now, I continue reading – lifting the dust of archives, tracing the moral DNA of empires. The covenant demands it. And dust, after all, is where every story of human belonging begins."

"The best writers are not merely stylists; they are custodians of sensibility. They bring with themselves the heaviness of culture, memory, grief, humour, private ghosts, inherited silences and the rest of the untranslatable textures of lived experience. They write from the grain of their mother tongue. They write from provincial landscapes that the internet has never indexed, not yet anyway. They write from the pain of exile, from the taste of a city’s dust and from history that refuses to be archived. AI, for all its omnivorous reading, knows only what is online."

"Beneath its quiet surfaces, Szalay’s novel probes the cultural unease of our time – the exhaustion of liberal optimism, the backlash angst against 'wokeness' and the waning of faith in collective redemption."

"It is not often that a volume of poetry captures the public imagination in South Africa. Yet, Siphokazi Jonas’s Weeping becomes a river has done just that. This is an unlikely and heartening success in a literary landscape where poetry is often treated as the private language of a select few. One wonders, inevitably, about the reasons behind this resonance."

"Morafe: Person, family and nation in colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s is a landmark achievement. Khumisho Moguerane has written a history that matters for our time by filling the lacunae in southern African historiography."

"What bugged me most about the book was Stewart’s interpretive framework. It is shaped by an uncritical acceptance of imperial ideology, even as he softly mocks it sometimes."

"Today, oral history is no longer a mere preliminary to written records; it is a paradigmatic epistemology capable of conveying grief, contradiction, cosmology and lived memory. It preserves what empire seeks to forget, affirming that memory and voice remain more enduring than ink."

"The DA’s frustrations with the ANC are understandable; so are the Western Cape’s citizens’ grievances with crime and governance. But the remedy cannot be the slow dismantling of the very republic that holds us together."

"Africa is not merely a matter of geography. It is a wound still healing, a question still posed, a promise yet unfulfilled. For those of us who believe in her future, that work of memory and of resistance remains unfinished."

"The book succeeds admirably in mapping the spiritual geography of our black lives, especially how our indigenous cosmology, shaped by centuries of ancestral wisdom, gradually morphed into what is now termed 'religion' with the advent of Christian missionaries."

"The implications are stark. If those entrusted with the highest ranks of law enforcement cannot operate without fear or favour because they fear political retaliation, then our entire criminal justice system is endangered."

"Coalition politics is not about ideological triumph, but deliverable results – rebuilding Eskom, fixing Transnet, unclogging ports, revitalising public education, etc. These are tasks that transcend partisan lines. No coalition can function without a competent, apolitical bureaucracy. A phased, legally mandated Skills and Integrity Audit of senior civil servants, overseen by the Public Service Commission, should be launched, with clear benchmarks, retraining and regular reviews."

"This is no sudden collapse. It is a pattern that has been years in the making ..."

"What we ask of literary prizes is not infallibility, but integrity, imagination and boldness. The awarding of a prize should strive to be as fearless and far-reaching as the fiction it celebrates."