My Life is unlike any of Athol Fugard’s other plays. With this workshopped production, he told Mark Gevisser, he, like this country, has started again FIVE teenage girls on stage, filled with adolescent hope and naivety, play out a parable for racial reconciliation simply by telling their stories. What on earth is Athol Fugard up […]
SOUTH AFRICA’S R2-million effort to help Rwandan refugees — seven Air Force flights carrying 136 tons of food and medicine — was but a drop in the ocean. It was not even enough to sustain for a single day the 250 000 destitute Rwandans at the Tanzanian border town of Ngara, where most of the […]
Weekly Mail Reporter THE police file on Mail & Guardian co-editor Anton Harber — the first such security file from the 1980s to be released — consists of three scanty A4 pages of a computer printout, filled with errors. If the file is anything to go on, the police knew almost nothing about Harber; what […]
Dutch bassist Eric van der Westen keeps forging links with South African jazz. Now local musos can sample his technique at a series of workshops. Gwen Ansell reports `LAST time I left South Africa,” reflects Dutch jazz bassist Eric van der Westen over a heaped plate of Yeoville’s best bacon and eggs, “it took me […]
Both managements and unions will have to adapt to deal with the rising tide of worker militancy, writes Drew Forrest IT somehow seemed out of place in the brave new South Africa — a white manager of Pick ‘n Pay’s Southgate store held hostage by black strikers in his office, a sharpened broomstick at his […]
Farouk Chothia THE IFP last weekend adopted a new constitution that attempts to put into practice what it preaches: the devolution of power along federal lines. It is similiar to a constitution the IFP adopted in 1990 — and never implemented. Power remained firmly in the hands of president Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Large sections of the […]
Labour tenants are fighting back after a wave of evictions, reports Vuyo Mvoko MBULAWA Mavimbela faces a terrible dilemma — either he loses his home or all the wealth he has accumulated in his 55 years: 27 cows and 54 sheep. Mavimbela, a “farm boy” since birth, is a labour tenant in the Piet Retief […]
CINEMA: Fabius Burger AT a recent Hollywood party, Jodie Foster jumped on Mel Gibson’s back and rode him like a horse — apparently their way of showing that Maverick, their upcoming western, will be politically correct. Women, no longer loving wives frying corn fritters back at the homestead, now also brandish the whip. But two […]
Whites are still being prosecuted for refusing to attend camps, reports Stefaans Brummer SOUTH Africa’s new ministry of defence has come under fire for persisting with a whites-only call-up and prosecutions of those who fail to report for duty. While the Defence Act was amended last year to abolish white conscription and create a non-racial […]
CRICKET: Paul Martin OLD Father Time, the most famous weather-cock in the world, swivels gently about the grandstand at Lord’s, the planet’s most famous cricket ground. The message for cricketers and spectators alike is that time catches up with us all, though judging from his still well-muscled physique, it has been kind to Michael John […]