Andy Colquhoun in Parramatta RUGBY Reporting on the Springboks occasionally puts one in mind of what it may have been like tramping in the wake of Caesar’s army as it marched into Germania each summer to campaign against the Visigoths (the author and proprietors of the Mail & Guardian in no way vouch for the […]
An exhibition of the work of architect Roelof Uytenbogaardt is a nostalgic tribute to South Africa’s most significant urban thinker Melinda Silverman The dark, 17th-century Dutch interior of the Old Town House in Cape Town houses a reverential exhibition of the work of Roelof Uytenbogaardt, modern South African architecture’s master of lightness and space. But […]
Peter Robinson CRICKET Of all the mistakes made by Shaun Pollock in his first Test match as captain (and, let’s be honest, he made a few), the worst by some distance was his failure to call the toss correctly on the first morning in Galle. A lot went wrong for South Africa in the first […]
Khadija Magardie Malaria is by far Africa’s most important tropical parasitic disease, and kills more people than any other communicable disease except tuberculosis. And though the geographical area affected by malaria has shrunk over the past 50 years, the Southern African region continues to experience a resurgence in malaria transmission, especially in the past four […]
Those who are least keen on our new democracy, it seems, make most use of it. Take the current mobilisation against the Property Rates Bill, which offers further evidence that neat theories often fail to explain political life here. Logic suggests that majority rule should relegate whites to the outer margins of public debate. Race […]
A new report uncovers a secret SADF project to ‘cure’ homosexuals by giving them sex changes Paul Kirk Sex-change operations, medical torture and chemical castration were perpetrated on national servicemen in a bizarre programme to cure “deviants” during the apartheid era. To this day dozens of victims of the programme are crippled and disfigured, stranded […]
Khadija Magardie BEYOND RIGHTS TALK AND CULTURE TALK: COMPARATIVE ESSAYS ON THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS AND CULTURE edited by Mahmood Mamdani (David Philip) The politics of rights and culture revolves around a specific question – can a culture of individual rights coexist with the right of every individual to practice one’s culture? The essays in […]
Namibia Tangeni Amupadhi Just when it seemed as if cross-border attacks on north- eastern Namibia by Angolan gunmen had stopped, the killing has started again. At least three people were killed and close to half a dozen have been injured in the past three weeks in the Kavango region, following a month-long lull in raids […]
Andrew Worsdale TELEVISION I was there. At Granny Lee’s funeral in the Anglican Cathedral in downtown Johannesburg in 1989. As someone remarks in the upcoming documentary Metamorphosis: The Remarkable Journey of Granny Lee, “It was a de luxe state funeral.” I’d met him some years earlier when I used to hang out with friends at […]
Howard Barrell There is widespread support for democracy among people in countries neighbouring South Africa, according to a six- nation survey of public attitudes conducted by a consortium of researchers headed by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). Southern Africans credit democracy for achieving significant increases in their political freedoms but they are […]