Why We Need to Revisit the Past
Holidays are a great time to chill, relax and have a chance to allow your mind to wonder. I am not a New Year’s resolution type of guy, for consistency is everything and minor...
Category: History
Author: Why I Reopened Old Wounds
A memoir by a Catholic author about growing up under apartheid has been a surprise bestseller in South Africa this year. Günther Simmermacher interviewed Beryl Crosher-Segers. What was supposed to be a family memoir...
A Jesuit at the Cape in the 1680s
Jesuit Father Guy Tachard, an astronomer and something of a secret agent, visited the Cape of Good Hope in 1685 and again two years later. While he was received with courtesy, he and the...
An Ordinary Life In An Extraordinary Time
A DARKER SHADE OF PALE, by Beryl Crosher-Segers. Torchflame Books, Durham NC, 2018. 243pp Reviewed by Günther Simmermacher The rich body of literature on the subject of apartheid has rather neglected the experience of...
Still Seeking the Mountaintop: 50 years after Martin Luther King’s Assassination
Father Pat Connor was on his way from a graduate class at the University of Memphis to St. Joseph Hospital to visit a priest friend the evening of April 4, 1968.
King Williams’s Town Dominicans – 140 Years in South Africa
King William’s Town Dominicans celebrated their 140th anniversary in South Africa with a jubilee Mass in Johannesburg led by Auxiliary Bishop Duncan Tsoke.
How My Father’s Death Led to a Book
My father’s death, after almost a lifetime of absence, seems to close the yawning chasm between us. I feel him closer in death than when he was alive. The seed of an “inclination to look back on history” was planted the day I heard he had died.
Secret Deal? Vatican Archives and the Holocaust
Secret negotiations between Heinrich Himmler and a Swiss Catholic politician, hired by a Jewish woman and helped by an Italian papal nuncio, may have contributed to ending the mass extermination of the Jewish people.
We Must Share Dangerous Memories
“To keep a dangerous memory alive, we need to tell and hear our South African story. We need to find a unifying narrative that allows us all to claim a better life for all...
Was Jesus Killed Illegally? Pilate and Roman Law on Execution
Patrick Dacey, Johannesburg – At the time of Jesus, Roman law had been codified in what is known as the Twelve Tables. Table IX, Law No 6, stated: “Putting to death of any man...
How the Crusaders Changed the World
In February GÜNTHER SIMMERMACHER made a private visit to the Holy Land. In the fifth of a series of six articles, he considers the Crusaders and their legacy. When the terrorists of ISIS announce...
The Revealing Diary of a British Trooper
Thomas J Lucas, a trooper in the Cape Mountain Rifles of the Cape Colony during the mid-19th century, kept a private journal. He began it when he was shipped off from London on the...
