In Africa, where you lay your hat is not necessarily your home, writes Arthur Maimane Robert Gue

This month Pieter-Dirk Uys takes his Aids education mission to a higher level Marianne Merten Who will ever forget the biting satire of Pieter-Dirk Uys’s PW Botha and his wagging finger that elicited laughter during the harshest apartheid years? Or Evita Bezuidenhout, the glamorous ambassador to Bapetikosweti, who turned homeland politics upside down. And the […]

Khadija Magardie Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey by Alison Wearing (Macmillan) The picture of a black-eyed, veiled woman on the cover of Canadian journalist Alison Wearing’s new book would suggest yet another “us versus them” book on the stereotypical exoticism of the Middle East. It is a disappointment that, three chapters into the book, […]

innovations Samsung has created a spectacularly fast Graphics Memory Chip: a 128MB DDR-SDRAM. That’s a bigger memory than most PCs have in the form of conventional memory. The new chip runs at 500 megabits a second (mbps), and will allow gamers especially to experience far higher resolution and clarity of image. Samsung claim the chips […]

Chris Dunton Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe (Oxford University Press) Novels such as Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People have been so successful worldwide they have tended to overshadow Chinua Achebe’s non-fictional works. For over 30 years, though, the Nigerian has been demonstrating he is a master essayist. His new book, […]

HOWARD BARRELL, Johannesburg | Friday PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki’s standing among South Africans has plummeted in recent months, according to the results of a wide-ranging public opinion poll released this week. Only one in two South Africans (50,2%) approves of the job he is doing, according to a survey by the Institute for Democracy in South […]

A national sporting body’s reluctance to take action against a child molester has highlighted the vulnerability of disabled children Stefaans Brmmer T wo sports associations for the disabled kept on a senior executive, sentenced to 10 years in jail for sexually assaulting a 16- year-old Down’s Syndrome girl, giving him the opportunity to continue working […]

Barry Streek The Independent newspaper group’s editors won a significant victory over the company’s management this week when executives abandoned their hardline stance that they have the right to publish free advertisements without the editors’ approval. The group’s management conceded in a statement, issued by its chief executive officer, Ivan Fallon, and its chief operating […]

David Beresford Another Country As a student I turned up at my favourite pub one evening to find myself banned from the premises for having danced on the tables the night before. I had not been there the night before and I had not danced on the tables (although I subsequently made a point of […]

John Matshikiza with the lid off My old friend Moji from exile days came running wildly up Rockey Street the other day and seemed relieved to see a friendly face. He sat down without even saying hello after all these years. He had a heavy situation on his mind. “I just paid R10 for a […]