Howard Barrell OVER A BARRELL Helen Suzman was speaking with little fear of contradiction. “Some odd characters,” she told the assembled Democratic Party faithful on Monday, “have been joining the party.” She had the good grace this week – at a ceremony to name the DP’s parliamentary caucus room in Parliament after her and to […]

Helene Dancer CD OFTHEWEEK LTJ Bukem does in his debut album just what Daisy Buchanan does to Jay Gatsby in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:he puts you in a little cloud and pushes you around. United Kingdom musician and DJ LTJ “Danny Williamson” Bukem has this year released Journey Inwards on his Good Looking […]

Michel D Kazatchkine and Didier Fassin The controversy generated by President Thabo Mbeki’s statements on the role of HIV as the causal agent of Aids has led some investigators to question their participation in the forthcoming 13th international conference on Aids to be held in Durban in the second week of July. In a letter […]

transformation SERJEANT AT THE BAR The brouhaha that was occasioned by the statement of Smuts Ngonyama about the judiciary (that is, the first statement, in which he apparently did not mean to say what he was reported to have said!) has perhaps taken on rather more significance after the tragic loss to the judiciary of […]

Iden Wetherell There are 120 seats at stake in this weekend’s parliamentary elections and for the first time since independence in 1980 an opposition party is contesting them all. Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai says he is not looking at sending a handful of MPs to Parliament in Harare. He intends to […]

A TWIN-SUMMIT of heads of state and government of central Africa opened on Friday in Libreville with five heads of state from the sub-region attending. Scheduled to begin on Thursday, the Central African Economic and Monetary Community and the Economic Community of Central African States summits were delayed for 24 hours due to the late […]

Nicholas Lezard BODY LANGUAGE Jared Diamond asks an interesting question in the title of his recent book Why Is Sex Fun? To which the first answer could be: is it? I remember one bookshop which put The Joy of Sex in its fiction section. This is not just a joke. It illustrates that there are […]

Stephen Bierley TENNIS Lleyton Hewitt, the brilliant 19-year-old Australian who so spectacularly defeated Pete Sampras in the Stella Artois final at Queen’s last Sunday, found his Wimbledon path heading back towards the reigning champion this week when the draw was made for the championships beginning next Monday. Hewitt, the seventh seed, who pulled out of […]

Peter Robinson Over the past few weeks South African cricket has been twisting and turning in mostly self-inflicted agony. But now we know the “Hansiegate” scandal not to be the product of bumbling Indian policemen or even, as was suggested at one stage, a devious Australian plot, what exactly is to be done next? In […]

Belinda Beresford Position, position, position is the guiding maxim in property. But Donald Gordon, former head of Liberty Life and now head of Liberty International, is finding that possession is equally important. Having, metaphorically speaking, built a palatial mansion in South Africa called the Liberty Group, Gordon moved on to the more select address of […]