Merle Colborne Little evening bags and small binoculars. Tickly throats and Black Magic. And then the final fling, piping “Encore! Encore!” and pounding one’s feet on the floor and even perhaps doing a spot of standing up. Natal was awfully English going to the opera. Now opera audiences in KwaZulu-Natal rise from their seats whenever […]

Greg Bowes It’s rare that we get ace international hip-hop acts in town and when groups who incorporate these elements do visit, the reception has been less than lukewarm. Consider the plights of Anglo-Asian anarcho-noise makers Fun-Da-Mental and slick Arrested Development, who both dished out masterful, remarkable music to mediocre receptions in the Nineties. Eargasm […]

Nechama Brodie The Bang-Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva (William Heinemann) Contemporary visual theorists have spent decades educating people about “ways of seeing”. Images have become texts, subject to interpretation, evaluation, criticism and judgement. We are expected not just to see, but to actually develop a conscious relationship with the visual media that […]

Thebe Mabanga in your ear I recently had the opportunity to listen to scenario planner Wolfgang Grukel give a talk on his book, Ten lessons from the future. Grukel paints an interesting picture of what life will be like in 2020. When one thinks of radio in its capacity as the country’s most accessible medium, […]

Harry Pearson On Saturday I met a man from Ashington who recently moved to Portobello in Edinburgh. He said the first week he was up in Scotland, he was chatting to a local woman he’d met at his running club. By way of introducing him to the area she listed the many celebrities who come […]

Shirley Kossick The judges in Exclusive Books’s promotional “Boeke Prize” which highlights six novels, have come up with a really strong shortlist this year. It includes Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True (Phoenix), which topped the American bestseller lists in 1998. This gripping story of identical twins is told by Dominick, whose whole […]

David Basckin LIFESTYLE In the eternal debate about which came first, the chicken or the egg, let me tell you, brothers and sisters, that the truth is finally known. It was the chicken. And how do we know this? Through direct observation of the real world, the only universal path to truth. It happened like […]

Jazz guitarist Jimmy Dludlu has come a long way since cutting his teeth with groups like Loading Zone and Mack Denite Thebe Mabanga There are many sides to Jimmy Dludlu. There is the stylish, celebrated jazz guitarist who strums his custom-made, semi-acoustic guitar to the delight of audiences on either side of the South African […]

Broadcast rights might be changed by the new boxing Bill Deon Potgieter Section 29 of the new boxing Bill has caused a stir within the boxing fraternity. If passed, it could have major ramifications on the sport as we know it. Some say it would lead to the demise of boxing in South Africa. Others […]

Kenya is in the grip of a drought, but there are runs aplenty at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club Peter Robinson in Nairobi Kenya’s minister for the environment let his view on law and order be known this week. He reckons criminals, even those merely under suspicion, should be taken out and lynched publicly. Put that […]