Barry Streek South Africa’s tougher new gun control regime is rapidly taking shape in Parliament in Cape Town. Prospective gun- owners will have to be older than in the past, demonstrate that they are competent to have a firearm and will hold a licence for a fixed period only, rather than for life. It seems […]

The art of inefficient building in South Africa is by no means restricted to low- cost housing. Like clothes and cars, the design of modern South African buildings is only partly to provide utility – it’s also important to signal the status and fine taste of their owners. In doing so they have lost a […]

Adam Evans I was having a quiet drink with an old friend the other day when he told me, very proudly, that he had just finished his first novel. This was completely out of character – he had never displayed any interest in writing before – and, with mounting amazement, I asked him what it […]

The dream was of a personal jet-pack and not just for the high flyer. However this blue skies technology never took off David Hambling This 21st century is not what it was cracked up to be. It is not that I actually wanted to live in a gleaming glass skyscraper attended by robot butlers, and […]

A quality of South Africans is that we believe the world is ours for the taking. Not for us the business of playing percentages. There’s nothing of the effete English cricketer in us. No, if there is a game to be played or a race to be run, we know that we can win it. […]

Braam Kruger’s new book of recipes pays tribute to the exotic communities whose food is sold on the city streets Matthew Krouse Braam Kruger lives in a dream state – in Observatory, Johannesburg. He reminds one of a plaster gnome who dwells under a large mushroom, along with the fairies at the bottom of the […]

Mike Berger A SECOND LOOK The issues of race and racism in our public life seem inescapable. Yet ordinary South Africans manifest an amazing ability to relate to one another as members of the same human family; often much more so than would be suggested from the content of the media. Nevertheless, it is clear […]

Mail & Guardian reporter Contemporary Western horror of eating people could be an aberration, and has a lot to answer for in the world of anthropology, which is a Western creation. Evidence for cannibalism abounds – even if circumstantial – both from the modern world and throughout history, but academic anthropology has found itself in […]

Ordinary Chinese in South Africa look to charity, religion, business and culture to counter divisive politics. Osita Nwajah reports The men, women and children assemble in their numbers. The compact space outside a house in Mamatheda Street in Mofolo, Soweto, can’t contain all of them, so they spill into the narrow street. The people, clutching […]