Fine Music Radio – ‘People of Note’ interview
Listen to an interview with Rodney Trudgeon, accompanied by choices of music, broadcast by Cape Town’s Fine Music Radio in April 2022.
Category Archives: Commentary
A Life of Tenacity, Constancy and Courage – Desmond Tutu Dies at 90
First published on allAfrica.com on December 26, 2021
Desmond Tutu lived his life with passion, courage, faith and deep insight, but it was a life lived against the odds.
Sickly at birth, as an infant he survived polio, which left him with a permanently weakened right hand. As a teenager he suffered tuberculosis, which left adhesions on his lungs. Later in the 1980s, when he became, in Nelson Mandela’s words “public enemy number one” to the apartheid regime, he survived a number of assassination attempts. And for the last 25 years of …
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Who is Cyril Ramaphosa?
Ahead of the election of a new leader of South Africa’s governing African National Congress in December 2017, the readers of allAfrica.com, the website I have helped edit and run since 2006, knew the one contestant in the race, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as the former chair of the African Union Commission.
But they didn’t know the other, Cyril Ramaphosa, nearly as well. Having followed his rise first as a union then a party leader, I felt the story of a person I had observed as a canny political operator was one worth …
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American Ubuntu: Springsteen, South Africa and 9/11
by John Allen
A reflection on Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s first visit to South Africa
Somehow I managed to miss Bruce Springsteen when others in my generation were listening to him.
I knew who he was, vaguely. But I guess journalism in the wake of first the Soweto uprising, then the states of emergency after the Vaal uprising of 1984, gave us all the excitement we needed. So I wasn’t among the South Africans who poured across the border into Zimbabwe in 1988 to hear him compare “the systematic apartheid …
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South Africa Boos & Cheers Leaders As It Celebrates Mandela
The world was treated to a display at the official memorial service for Nelson Mandela of how South Africa was freed from apartheid and became a democracy: a feisty, even bloody-minded citizenry determined to have its say, backed by massive international support.
Add to that a resilience of spirit which enables them to turn a time of mourning into one of joyous celebration of the life being remembered.
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FOOTLOOSE: Column [Extract]
http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2301362
The Weekender (Business Day), Johannesburg, October 21, 2006
READERS of Footloose will be familiar with the phenomenon by which the subjects of authorised biographies suddenly get cold feet when biographers do their jobs properly and dig out the dirt on them.
Nelson Mandela’s success in forcing Anthony Sampson to cut out a reference to his support for necklacing is one example. Another is the row between Nadine Gordimer and her authorised-biographer-who-now-isn’t, Ronald Suresh Roberts.
It is, therefore, with growing respect for Desmond Tutu that Footloose discovered the Arch² plays things differently.
An account of relations between Tutu and …
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Trinity Church, Wall Street interviews John Allen
I recently visited Trinity Church, in Wall Street, Manhattan, to discuss Archbishop Tutu’s life and work. Trinity has posted a video webcast of the interview on their site.
Trinity has other excellent video material and documentaries on Desmond Tutu, which are also available on their site. In particular, the film “Faithful Defiance: A Portrait of Desmond Tutu” (link is the high-resolution version) contains footage of events in “Rabble-Rouser”.
“A riveting book… A profound portrait” – Comments on “Rabble-Rouser”
Commentators, writers and leaders have provided pre-publication comments for the jacket of “Rabble-Rouser for Peace.” Among comments which will be used, on the jackets of either the U.S. or S.A./U.K. editions:
“A superb book, showing what an extraordinary peacemaker—and warm human being—Desmond Tutu is. It makes fascinating reading.” — Mary Robinson, President, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globablization Initiative, and Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
“Apartheid never defeated (Desmond Tutu) because of his passionate belief that the status of every human being is God-given and indelible… This book tells his story: how he …
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