From The Thornveld

Mandla J.

Onyeka Nwelue, Home Affairs: A Novel (Bayan Street Books, 2026) NOT many novels are set in Pietermaritzburg, especially amid the unlikely surroundings of the dreaded Department of Home Affairs described by Nigerian writer Onyeka Nwelue as a ‘place of hone…

FOR the first time in two or more years, according to British political opinion polls, Nigel Farage and his right-wing populist Reform party seem to be on the back foot.

PROBABLY the greatest error of judgement I have ever made was based on an assumption that public bodies, given reasonable adaptation required by the passage of time, possessed institutional culture that would preserve their essential nature.

Philippe Denis, The Road to Unity: The Lutheran Churches of Southern Africa Confronting a Divided Past (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2026) PIETERMARITZBURG could have been the pre-eminent South African centre for theological studies.

Charles van Onselen, Three Wise Monkeys: Volume I The Making of an African Economic Tragedy: Mozambique, circa 1500‒1960; Volume II Through the Turnstiles of the Mind: White South Africans and the Freedoms of Mozambique, circa 1914‒1975; Volume III The Qu…

A DOMINANT memory of that June of 1986 in Pietermaritzburg: grey, chilly days and dark, menacing evenings.

R.W.

THERE was no social media, nor cell phones, and where landlines were available they were too dangerous to use.

Lebo Diseko, The House at 6001: A Memoir of Uprising and Exile (Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan, 2026) ‘WHAT was it all for?’