Public spaces in cities usually attract interesting characters – especially if the spaces are also tourist attractions. Church Square in Pretoria is no exception – and has the added characteristic that it is a favourite gathering place for the start of protest marches...
“If you can’t see the country’s past, if you can’t hear the voices from the past then you can’t understand the present.” – Anglican priest Michael Weeder, quoted in Mike Nicol’s Sea-Mountain, Fire City (Kwela Books, 2001). “On its...
“…the evident longing of our times to understand through these delightful people the intrinsic nature of our species and of human alternatives.” – from Frontiers, by Noël Mostert. When whites first settled at the bottom end of Africa they encountered a...
“We were on a coast of centuries of sea tragedies, and of millennia of prehistoric habitation. A great deal of the strange and incomprehensible surrounded one there, and one was credulous of many things that one would not believe elsewhere. Such belief is a form of...
In the months prior to the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in 1899 the government of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR – the South African Republic) four forts were constructed to defend the capital, Pretoria. One of these, Fort Klapperkop, was built at a...
