Hypertext has had a huge effect on creative writing, pushing it to places it has been trying to go for decades Karlin Lillington When Apple decided to supply a copy of a little program called Hypercard on all Macintosh computers back in the 1980s, it prepared the way for what would become the Web’s most […]

Shaun de Waal CDs OFTHEWEEK Compay Segundo will be familiar to lovers of the Cuban music brought to international attention by the Buena Vista Social Club CDs and documentary. In case you’ve forgotten, he’s the nonagenarian who smokes those big fat cigars. The first singer to record a 78 in Cuba (in 1934), he was […]

Jaspreet Kindra President Thabo Mbeki has organised a top- level meeting with traditional leaders aligned to the Inkatha Freedom Party to address the amakhosi’s concerns that their power base in KwaZulu-Natal will be eroded by new local government structures. The traditional leaders, who have been pressing Mbeki to hear them for several months, are to […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Senior members of South Africa’s biggest vigilante group, Mapogo a Matamaga, want the notorious organisation to abandon its hallmark policy of viciously sjamboking suspected criminals. The Mapogo members have accused its controversial president, Monhle Magolego, an enthusiastic proponent of corporal punishment, of behaving like a dictator. They say the unlawful beating […]

Without funds from the provincial government, some farm schools in the region have been forced to close Lynda Gilfillan Schoombee Trust School is one of the luckier farm schools in the Eastern Cape. It’s still open. But throughout the province schools are closing because the provincial education department has paid neither boarding nor transport subsidies, […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 10.00am. NEGOTIATORS in close contact with Muslim rebels holding 21 people hostage in the Philippines, including two South Africans, said on Friday that all the hostages are still alive. They have apparently been moved to a single location after being split into smaller groups earlier this week. Negotiators said medical […]

John Hooper in Berlin The former head of East Germany’s Olympic programme went on trial this week in what will be an unprecedented public examination of the project to produce super women athletes by feeding them steroids without their knowledge. Opening the trial of Manfred Ewald, once head of the Gymnastics and Sports Federation, the […]

world Mercedes Sayagues President Robert Gabriel Mugabe this week articulated his vision of Zimbabwe in the new millennium: one redolent with the stale air of Albania under the paranoid Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who led his country into extreme isolation and penury during the Cold War – a country cut off from the rest of […]

Shaun de Waal MOVIE OFTHEWEEK The phantasmagoric imagination of Tim Burton seamlessly combines the adult sensibility of the horror tale and the cartoony delights of a children’s story, using a fairytale form to deal with death, destruction and the rest of the darker side of the human psyche. It is this vision that provides Burton’s […]

Merle Colborne LIFESTYLE The Friday-night crowd at the Flagons and Dragons pub in Durban’s Windermere Road have “lived-in” faces or, at least, faces that have been “stayed over in” a good few times. Loosened by lyrics and beer, the men hug a lot and stare damply into each other’s eyes. The women smile, the way […]