Steve Bunce BOXING When Cindy Zamudio torched the toilets at her high school in Los Angeles she had no idea she was on her way to the boxing ring. She was ready for a career in prison. Zamudio is 18 years old and 121kg. She is the super-heavyweight amateur champion of the United States and […]

Jaspreet Kindra As the Democratic Party flirts with the New National Party and the African National Congress espouses almost Thatcherite ideas, black consciousness parties and the Pan-Africanist Congress can safely claim to be the only ideological purists left in South Africa. Last week the Socialist Party of Azania (Sopa), the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) and […]

SOUTH Africa’s second local government elections should be held on December 2, the Independent Electoral Commission has proposed. Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi is likely to announce a date by the second week of July. The constitution says municipal elections should be held between November 1 and January 31 next year.

2000 party Neal Collins SOCCER Shortly after England had been knocked out of Euro 2000 in Belgium on Tuesday night, the BBC screened a documentary detailing the violence which had taken place in Brussels and Charleroi last weekend. At one point England’s finest young men, tattooed, earringed, drunk and overweight, were goading the Belgian police: […]

Tobias Schmitz CROSSFIRE There are currently strong signals in the media that the government intends to restructure Eskom into a holding company for a range of power generation, transmission and distribution agents. Things have changed since the 1960s and 1970s, when parastatals were an uncritically accepted vehicle of service delivery. During that period they were […]

Luvuyo Kakaza THEATRE The toll of apartheid on South Africa’s domestic workers has been well documented in literature, in television documentaries and in fiction film. These days, though, it’s rare to find a stage interpretation of the lives of household “servants”. But one is currently playing that could very well bring some guilty “madams” close […]

Mercedes Sayagues In a last, desperate move to win the election, Zanu-PF militia are confiscating identity documents from villagers and farm workers across the country. ID documents are needed to vote. A replacement costs Z$250, or three days of work. At Shaka farm in Wedza, militia collected all ID documents, as well as Z$16 a […]

Neal Collins South African cricketers everywhere have been hit hard by the wild swinging of Cronjegate. You might have found an angry little knot of them at Lord’s last week, looking embarrassed while, in Cape Town, their game and their nation were being dragged through the mud at the King commission. While Cronje confessed to […]

Mercedes Sayagues Why was Grace Mugabe sulking during her husband’s final campaign rally in Harare last Saturday? It could have been the low turnout – a mere 5E000 compared with the 100E000 who greeted Robert Mugabe on his return from exile 20 years ago. Or perhaps it was the three-hour delay in starting, while frantic […]

Meet the judges who will be presiding at the prestigious Investing in the Future Awards Mail & Guardian reporter An impressive panel of opinion-makers have agreed to judge the Investing in the Future Awards. The awards laud corporate social investment in South Africa and were established over a decade ago by the Mail & Guardian. […]