Nawaal Deane, Jaspreet Kindra and Belinda Beresford The Mail & Guardian this week asked all Cabinet ministers whether they were working on the assumption that HIV causes Aids. On Tuesday Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who had been one of 13 female foreign ministers who signed a letter to the United Nations Secretary General, […]

Paul Edmunds preview OFTHEWEEK Purple is the colour of majesty, madness and celebration. Purple is also the colour of the dye used by the South African Police when they hosed down peaceful anti- apartheid demonstrators in what came to be called Cape Town’s Purple Rain incident of 1987. To conceive of an arts festival that […]

Stephen Gray When, in 1914, Henry Rider Haggard inspected Pietermaritzburg’s newly opened Voor-trekker Museum, including the Church of the Vow and so on, he recorded in his diary that it was suitably packed with interesting mementoes of none but the “old Dutch”. Nowadays its ambit is hardly as exclusive, as I visited it for one […]

Cedric Mayson Spirit level The dominees deserve a wry vote of thanks for admitting to the flat-Earth theology still followed by many Christians in South Africa. Last week they stated in Synod: “The Dutch Reformed Church accepts the Bible in its totality and in all its parts as the word of God … On the […]

The host city braces itself against high winds and the tyranny of the sponsors Grant Shimmin in Sydney One of Sydney’s more popular radio stations is running a promotion that starts: “Spring in Sydney is easy; cool nights, clear sunny days, soft city breezes.” Well, I suppose two out of three ain’t bad, because they […]

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is a pawn in the hands of Ethiopian immigrants on conflicting sides of home country politics. Osita Nwajah reports You may mistake this for a local political gathering, if the things that you rely on to make a judgement are the red, yellow and green flag hanging above the speaker and […]

Khadija Magardie A controversial column by leading political scientist Steven Friedman has been axed from South Africa’s only Jewish newspaper with the approval of the country’s chief rabbi. The column, The Other View, appeared fortnightly in the South African Jewish Report until Friedman’s unorthodox views became too much of a “kvetsh” (bothersome or needling, in […]

Alexander Sudheim While most major music festivals tend to arrive in the world as humble, diminutive creatures that take many years to swell into significance, Awesome Africa has entered the scene at the top end of the market in impressive style. Only two years young this week, the festival formerly known as Living Treasures has […]

David Macfarlane Sharp disagreements among some of South Africa’s leading education experts this week indicate the Ministry of Education’s planned shake-up of higher education will be marked by bitter conflict and tense political infighting. The Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) recent recommendations for fundamental changes were the subject of a divisive panel discussion hosted by […]

Win one of three pairs of season tickets for the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Durban City Hall. Call Tel: (031) 369E9477 between 9am and 9.15am on September 18 and answer the question: Where does the spring season take place?