Booker Prize finalist Margaret Atwood can enter the mind of a murderer or a child bully with ease. She can convey human suffering like no one else. Her image is austere, yet her presence warm. Katharine Viner disentangles the woman from the writer Margaret Atwood would like to clear a few things up from the […]

John Barker Despite the heady trillion-dollar predictions for e-commerce, the reality is that life is hard for dot.com companies. The promise of great riches has produced hordes of wannabe sites, often grossly over-funded but run by inexperienced people. Even worse, the bricks and mortar outlets are starting to fight back. In this situation you can […]

real deal The bout between Mike Tyson and Andrew Golota could be more mayhem than Marquess of Queensbury Harry Pearson A century-and-a-half ago the great English showman Wombwell organised a fight between a pack of English mastiffs and one of the lions from his travelling menagerie. Ticket sales were brisk. On the night of the […]

Unlike the Yugoslavs, the Zimbabweans have yet to develop an effective culture of mass protest Iden Wetherell It has been called “the Milosevic effect”. But comparisons with Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s fall from power may be premature. Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, was this week the scene of riots over food prices. Bread has gone up by […]

Robert Mattes a second look South Africans could be forgiven if they have become a little arrogant about their new democracy. After all, who could blame them? They negotiated a “miracle” transition, steering from probable terrible conflict to non- racial peace in a few short years. They engineered a state-of-the-art Constitution replete with innovations like […]

An exhibition of portraits of Nelson Mandela questions the role that art plays in the construction of power Yvette Gresl Janet Wilson’s debut exhibition, Icon and Index, is an engrossing exploration of portraiture in post-apartheid South Africa. The subject of Wilson’s portraits is Nelson Mandela, unquestionably South Africa’s most ubiquitous political and cultural icon. I […]

Peter Robinson cricket Think of them as the rubber men: strangers from a faraway land who keep bouncing upright no matter how badly bent or twisted out of shape they might be. Oh, all right. That’s a bit over the top, but the distinguishing feature of Stephen Fleming’s New Zealand team as they trundle around […]

Godfrey Mutisya Crossfire The United States of Africa is becoming a buzzword across the continent in a manner reminiscent of classical pan-Africanism. A significant number of academics, politicians, journalists and political activists seem convinced that the current political and economic conflicts, poverty and endemic crisis of democracy and governance are evidence that the post- colonial […]

Friday is reviewing the format of its television pages. We’d like to hear from you. Fax (011) 727 7111 or e-mail [email protected] with answers to the following questions and any other comments: n Would you like to see more DStv schedules, or are the current highlights sufficient? n Do you prefer complete schedules for the […]

Shelley van der Merwe was sexually abused by her parents as a child. Now she uses art to deal with the trauma, writes Kathryn Smith Practising artists have certain ideas about the creative process and the potential it offers to work through ideas and experiences. Mostly personal, these experiences are filtered through a process of […]