Heidi Holland

"'I had been waiting in Harare for five weeks and had been vetted and grilled. In the end I received a call telling me I should be at State House in half an hour. I arrived at 10am and three hours later His Excellency - "HE" as everyone calls him - received me.'"

"I think he granted me the interview because he feels he is getting old and it's time to put certain things on the record. But he expects to win the election and probably will.'"

"'I needed help in understanding how events in Mugabe's life, including his childhood, had impacted on his internal narrative.' By the time Mugabe was 10, his father had left home and his older brother had died. 'Mugabe has a thin skin and shaky self-image. When rejected or humiliated, he turns to revenge. His relationship with the British government has the intensity of a family feud.'"

"The story of [Zuma's] actions on that fateful night last year is a sad reflection on the former deputy president's morals and code of conduct. Zuma is not fit to lead a country where women's rights are high on the agenda, where the fight against Aids is, or should be, an urgent national priority and where the protection of the weak and vulnerable is the duty of the powerful. South Africa deserves a president who can lead by example. Jacob Zuma has shown he cannot do that."

"It is difficult to reach consensus on a definition of racism, but most people agree that it starts with generalizations. It involves projecting the attributes of an individual onto a group as a whole on the basis of race, with pejorative connotations. Heidi Holland's narrative is a classic example of this kind of racist thinking."

"This kind of racism was rife in the early years of our democracy. It relegated whites to "second class citizens", unable to state a fact if any black person might be offended by it. This warped logic has thankfully diminished somewhat due to many (black and white) South Africans rejecting it for the nonsense that it is."