Yearly Archives: 2000

There was a good deal to commend in President Thabo Mbeki’s speech opening Parliament this month. But in one particular at least he fell woefully short of giving South Africans the reasoned leadership and guidance that the State of the Nation address is meant to embody. This is the issue of the HIV/Aids pandemic, identified […]

Brenda Atkinson MIXED MEDIA At a conference on new media in New York last week, I realised that the advent of the Internet is probably the single most forceful contribution to consumer empowerment the past century has seen. The gurus of online research brought home the message: in a digitised media environment where apertures proliferate […]

She fled Pinochet’s junta and began to write as a way of coping with exile and loss. She became a best-selling novelist but her masterpiece was a memoir of her daughter, who died at 26. Maya Jaggi on a feminist pioneer of Latin American literature Isabel Allende divides her life starkly into two: before and […]

Michelle Matthews ‘The future of music is in dance music.” Promoter Kim Saville, although a self- confessed rock fan, is savvy when it comes to market trends. Realising that “people will always dance”, the exuberant, opportunistic music-lover started easing her way into dance culture. In 1998 Saville released the first Future Sound of Cape Town […]

Raymond Parsons The highways of economic policy matter greatly, especially for a developing country like South Africa. So it is right that stakeholders and analysts have been lavish in their praise of the president’s review of successes in the economic field and of his government’s objectives regarding the future of its economic programmes. These have […]

Matthew Krouse CD of the week ‘The purpose of this album is to invite the world to discover the authentic, dynamic underground sound of the Japanese and European new jazz scene.” Oh, all right then – whatever that means – let’s turn it on. With such a heady pitch, brashly reckoning that the album is […]

Fiona Macleod First they were blamed for the Cape fires, now they’re being blamed for the floods. Experts say the huge forests of alien trees planted in the catchment areas of Mpumalanga have exacerbated the flooding that ravaged the province this week. Mpumalanga produces 39% of the country’s timber. Commercial timber, mostly pine and gum […]

South Africa may have as many as 20 000 Internet addicts, writes Howard Barrell Any South African company whose employees are linked to the Internet probably has at least one middle or senior manager suffering from some form of Internet addiction. And that may well be an underestimate of the problem, according to a number […]

As Africans, we have a terrific talent for talking. Whether or not we have an equal talent for doing still remains to be seen.