ONE hears a lot about sjamboks these days. Is this instrument a standard feature of everyday life? Where does one buy a sjambok? In a hardware shop? Or down some little lane rather like the special ...

‘We don’t want you here. We want this area clear,” says a man who hits us with a sjambok on the legs. It’s before 6am and pitch dark outside the Marabastad Home Affairs office in Pretoria. The man ...

The sjambok, that most vicious of South African whips, seems to be mounting a slow but steady comeback. In recent months, the sjambok, a bastardised name taken from the Malay cambuk, has been ...

A packed Nelson Mandela auditorium at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront listened intently as several former Robben Island prisoners regaled the audience with island stories at the official launch of Pan ...