ARCLIGHT Strategic Insights Podcast

In this episode of Arclight Strategic Insights, Andrew and Professor Anthony Turton unpack the history, ideology and evolution of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), one of the most important, and most misunderstood, movements in South African political history. The discussion traces the PAC’s roots in Pan-Africanism, Negritude and anti-colonial thought, its break from the ANC, and the deeper ideol...

This is the fourth conversation between Andrew Charter and Dr Anthony Turton. It’s where South Africa’s hydraulic mission collides with insurgency, intelligence operations, regional destabilisation, and the strategic geography of Southern Africa. Episode 3 examined the arithmetic limits of South Africa’s water system and the collapse of the hydraulic mission after 1994. This episode moves backward...

This is the fifth ARCLIGHT conversation between Andrew Charter and Dr Anthony Turton — and the first in what will become a new series examining the question that may be most consequential to understanding South Africa’s democratic era: who, exactly, was the ANC when it came to power? The surface answer is familiar. Liberation movement. Tripartite alliance. Mandela. Rainbow Nation. All of it true....

In 1981, a Soviet KGB officer operating under deep cover was arrested in South Africa. Kozlov was an “illegal” — a long-term infiltrator, not an embassy officer under diplomatic cover. South Africa had been involved in capturing Soviet operatives before — as the junior partner. This time, the National Intelligence Service led. The arrest is largely forgotten. Its consequences are not. This is the...

Eutectic freeze crystallisation pilot plant, Tweefontein, near Ogies. Nanodyn Group. Ninety-eight per cent. That’s how much of South Africa’s available water had been allocated by 2003. Not estimated. Not projected. Measured, modelled, and published in the first National Water Resource Strategy — a document that should have triggered a national emergency. It didn’t. This is the third episode of th...

The dams didn’t just hold water. They held the country together. This is the second episode of the conversation between Andrew Charter and Dr Anthony Turton — continuing the story of how South Africa engineered itself into existence, and what happened when that engineering became inseparable from diplomacy, intelligence, and war. Episode 1 traced the arc from Thomas Bain’s ox wagon to the Orange-F...

This is the first episode of a conversation between Andrew Charter and Dr Anthony Turton, water security expert and former NIS operative. The story begins not with apartheid, not with the mines, but with a road engineer travelling by ox wagon through the Northern Cape in the 1860s. What followed was a century of hydraulic engineering so consequential that it quietly underpinned everything — the co...