Shaun De Waal

Shaun de Waal has worked at the Mail & Guardian since 1989. He was literary editor from 1991 to 2006 and chief film critic for 15 years. He is now editor-at-large. Recent publications include Exposure: Queer Fiction, 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian and Not the Movie of the Week.

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/ 26 October 1999

MEHRTENS IN RACE AGAINST TIME

NEW Zealand fly-half Andrew Mehrtens is racing against time to be fit for Sunday’s World Cup semi-final against France at Twickenham. Goal-kicking ace Mehrtens underwent a scan on Tuesday to establish the seriousness of an injury to his left knee and the All Blacks were relieved that the scan showed no structural damage. “There is […]

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/ 10 July 1998

I am Milk

Andrew Clements CD of the week Some of the most successful American operas of the 1980s and 1990s have been documentary pieces, perhaps encouraged by the success of John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk comes from very much the same stable: it was premiered in Houston in […]

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/ 10 July 1998

First take a deep breath

Angella Johnson: VIEW FROM A BROAD True story: a woman was so terrified when asked to address a group of 250 students some years ago that she booked into a clinic and had the twisted second toe on her right foot broken. “I had put off having the operation for years,” she told me, “but […]

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/ 24 April 1998

Conka’s long walk to freedom

Tangeni Amupadhi Like President Nelson Mandela, Gaaitsiwe “Conka” Rakuba is a veteran prisoner who celebrated 27 Christmases behind bars. But he was jailed for different reasons. Rakuba (42) is a career prisoner: he first went to jail in 1970 and since then hadn’t spent more than three months “outside”, until his release last year. This […]

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/ 1 October 1997

Caught in the webs of the self

Boyhood differs from JM Coetzees novels, writes Shaun de Waal JM Coetzees new book, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, is a memoir of his growing up in Worcester and Cape Town in the 1940s and early 1950s, but it is written in the third person. The boy is named only once, and indirectly; otherwise, he […]

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/ 21 February 1997

Network service may shut down

Jacquie Golding-Duffy BROADCAST RESOURCES (BR), the network programming services arm of Primedia Broadcasting, is reassessing its role in the market with rumours persisting that the network may even shut shop. Resources managing director Chris Gibbons this week said the network is “reconfigurating”. BR is operating at a loss and the market it was planning to […]

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/ 12 April 1996

Puppets get behind bars

HAZEL FRIEDMAN attends three remarkable plays in which juvenile offenders express themselves with the aid of Puppets in Prison SEAN MCKINLEY admits to being proud of nothing in his young life. Except his digestive system. “Shit man, I’m good at swallowing anything — cell-phones, watches … you name it, I chow it.” From a distance, […]