There was a good deal to commend in President Thabo Mbeki’s speech opening Parliament this month. But in one particular at least he fell woefully short of giving South Africans the reasoned leadership and guidance that the State of the Nation address is meant to embody. This is the issue of the HIV/Aids pandemic, identified […]

Patekile Holomisa A SECOND LOOK One of the ironies of post-colonial Africa is the ease with which its new rulers find comfort within the governance systems of their former oppressors, while they all invariably seem not to know what to do with the indigenous systems that have somehow managed to survive the colonial onslaught. There […]

There was a programme the other night about men and their penises. The previous week, there was one about women and their clitorises, which featured liberated dames spreading their legs before mirrors, solemnly admiring the “beauty of their vaginas” for the benefit of assembled academia and TV cameras. It was a bit strange watching that […]

Gregory Mthembu-Salter In a world where metal prices are only just starting to emerge from a three-year slump, and Internet companies are the darlings of the stock market, prospects for substantial fresh investment in Southern Africa are bad, but getting better. This was the message emanating this week from Indaba 2000, Africa’s premier mining investment […]

Internet relay chat (IRC) became easier when “talking heads” arrived: you could have a face for each member of the conversation, even if it wasn’t their real face. Now Lake Clear Interactive has produced IRC Toons, a Windows program that can be downloaded free from www.irctoons.com. It lets you create characters for use on IRC […]

MOZAMBIQUE has appealed for $2.7-million to help victims of flooding from torrential rains that have swamped parts of southern Africa, the United Nations said on Friday. Donations will be used to purchase emergency supplies including inflatable boats, life jackets, life buoys, tents, as well as ropes, torches and pumps, the UN Office for the Coordination […]

Q & A Manaka Ranaka is the latest addition to the cast of Isidingo (SABC3, Monday to Thursday at 18.30pm). The blond, dreadlocked 20-year-old plays Nandipha, a streetwise maid for Derek Nyathi. In the few months since arriving at Horizon Deep, she has crossed paths with the town’s crook, George Zamdela, and wreaked havoc with […]

Brenda Atkinson MIXED MEDIA At a conference on new media in New York last week, I realised that the advent of the Internet is probably the single most forceful contribution to consumer empowerment the past century has seen. The gurus of online research brought home the message: in a digitised media environment where apertures proliferate […]

David Davies Golf Tiger Woods, for whom record breaking seems to be the normal situation, has equalled one of the more unlikely marks in golf, and is now in pursuit of one of the most preposterous. The world number one, whose win at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am this week took his successive United States […]