I walked into the room on Tuesday, the 23rd October 2012, and on the television screen was the repeat of the previous day’s debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, who are tussling over votes for the presidency of the United States. I sat down to watch the two men wrestling over foreign policy issues. Their verbal sparring centered around three main topics: the problems in the Middle East, particularly their perceived threat emanating from Iran and its nuclear programme; the capacity of their armed forces to subdue the world, and the challenge that China offers the US on the economic front. I was struck by the way both men, but particularly Obama, anchored their foreign policy positions...

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I know I did write about Zimbabwean forced migrants before, but I can’t resist a recent painful incident, if only to help me make a point. The bell at the gate rings and I could make out from the accent that it is a Zimbabwean woman. I ask my wife to go and attend to her. After some fifteen minutes or so she comes back into the house very upset, mumbling something about it not being fair and raiding the refrigerator and cupboards in the kitchen for food. She puts these in two plastic bags, one for ready-to-eat stuff and the other for those that need cooking. She goes into the bedrooms in search of clothes in the wardrobes to give to the visitors outside...

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Do you want to be a “star” in South Africa? Do you want the media to follow you everywhere you go and to record every word you utter? Do you want your picture to adorn the front pages of newspapers and your face and voice to get into every household in the country through television? If so, why don’t you try your hand at corruption, theft of public money, fraud, money laundering and associated pursuits? It has been shown again and again in our country in recent years that these are a sure route to celebrity status. Some streets were cordoned off recently in Polokwane when some people appeared in court to answer charges of corruption, fraud and money laundering...

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I used to think I could be an inspiration to learners in our schools. Whenever some of them referred to their poverty and other forms of disadvantage as a reason for their poor performance in their studies, I would scold them and urge them to be positive. I would tell them about myself: that I was born on a white man's farm to farm labourer parents; that I started school in a mud church in which a number of grades wereseated in separate corners in the same hall and taught by one unqualified teacher, who moved from one "class" to another whilst others were kept busy through writing tasks; that despite all that I persevered with education to the extent that I became a minister of science in our republic...

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Steve Biko was a man of supreme personal courage, who was imbued with an unshakeable sense of justice, a razor-sharp intellect and extraordinary vision. His every thought, his every action, were indefatigably dedicated to the quest for human dignity and, more particularly, the quest for black dignity. Biko was so committed to the quest for black dignity that he once boldly declared that "you are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicising thing."  Such was the bravery of the man...

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