Paul Kirk and Jaspreet Kindra The mayor of KwaNongoma, who was slain this week, had been running a protection racket in which he and his associates allegedly beat residents of the KwaZulu- Natal town if they did not pay him R50 a month. The assassination of mayor Bhekuyise Sikhonde, an Inkatha Freedom Party strongman, instantly […]
Paul Kirk The deputy mayor of Durban has been charged with assault after being accused of attacking four teenagers with electrical garden equipment, sjamboks and knobkieries. Mveli Mavundla, the African National Congress deputy mayor of Durban Metro, appeared briefly in the Umlazi Magistrate’s Court this week after allegedly assaulting four teenagers accused of being thieves. […]
For one week during 1971 the small Free State town of Excelsior was crawling with reporters from all over the world. A sex ring had been uncovered in which local farmers and businessmen were engaged in steamy escapades with their black maids. Zakes Mda reports I have recently become a frequent visitor to Excelsior, since […]
present Ben Joseph Wayne Barker and Claire de Jong have mounted an exhibition at the NSA Gallery in Durban entitled Lost & Found. The work is characterised by bold neon statements, such as Loss, Hunger, Memory, mounted on large constructions of disfigured books and wax. Suggesting the work of some of the pop artists, objects […]
exploding David Shapshak For once, you couldn’t really say that the film betrays a great novel. L Ron Hubbards’s novel Battlefield Earth is an epic mostly because it’s 1E064 pages long, not because it’s one of the great science- fiction novels of the genre. Hubbard is not the Tolkien or Asimov of his field and […]
A SECOND phone operator will be up and running in May 2002, the Business Day reports. The government announced on Thursday that Telkom’s monopoly is to end in less than two years. The paper says the news has been welcomed by several industry players amid expectation that lower prices and better service will result from […]
Howard Barrell OVER A BARREL If you want to risk feeling profoundly depressed – and some people do enjoy a state of hopelessness – then I have a suggestion for you. Go the African National Congress’s website (www.anc.org.za) and read the discussion documents for a meeting of its national general council due to be held […]
David Le Page A dramatic report from the World Commission on Dams (WCD), based in Cape Town, has overturned the long-standing assumption that hydroelectric power is environmentally clean. According to the report, dams often release large quantities of methane gas from rotting vegetable matter. Methane is a 20 times more effective greenhouse gas than carbon […]
In South Africa tasks normally performed by coroner units are the job of policemen assigned to mortuaries Khadija Magardie Policemen assigned to the medico-legal services wing of the South African Police Service perform tasks that make them more suited to medical scrubs than blue uniforms. Among other things, they prepare bodies for the pathologist – […]
tourism Barry Streek Discussions are being held about the establishment of the Wild Coast National Park in Pondoland and the creation of the Maluti Drakensberg Transfrontier Park, which will include the Golden Gate and QwaQwa National Parks, says Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa. He also says the decision to place 12 […]