An historian has urged a commission to quiz those involved in Patrice Lumumba’s murder. Ian Black reports from Brussels Evidence of direct Belgian government complicity in the execution of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba must be made public and those implicated questioned, a historian demanded last week. Lugo de Witte, a Flemish expert on Africa, called […]

OFFICIALS from English Premiership club Watford say Democratic Republic of Congo striker Michel Ngonge is likely to miss the African Nations Cup finals because his wife is expecting a child.

Jubie Matlou The Johannesburg City Council was on a collision course with the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) this week over its “Igoli 2002” masterplan, creating a dispute that could chart the way the African National Congress settles its differences with its alliance partners. The transformation scheme – which will entail a privatisation drive […]

SOUTH Africa and Hungary have agreed to intensify political cooperation, a Pretoria government statement said after a meeting on Friday between senior foreign ministry officials from the two countries. At the meeting, Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad and visiting Hungarian Political State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Zsolt Nemeth signed an agreement on political consultations.

Shaun Harris The asset management industry’s newest kid on the block, Velocity Asset Management, had a difficult birth. It was launched at the beginning of last August into a tumultuous market, and also had to cope with the hangover of the Old Mutual Asset Managers’ (Omam) court action enforcing restraint of trade agreements against some […]

Howard Barrell A who’s who of the Democratic Party in Gauteng will testify before an internal investigation which began its hearings in Sandton on January 21, into allegedly fraudulent membership lists in branches in the DP’s Johannesburg heartland. Peter Leon, the former provincial leader of the DP, Jack Bloom, another of the party’s representatives in […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg, Pietersburg | Friday 3.50pm THE government plans to privatise thousands of properties and fixed assets from its R120-billion property portfolio. Business Report quotes Public Works Minister Stella Sigcau as saying that the government intends to dispose of all redundant state-owned houses within the first half of this year. Sigcau is also reported […]

Karen Rutter Review of the week The advance rumours were suspiciously PC. Romeo and Juliet set on the Cape Flats, a suitably representative cast – and the tragic convenience of a divided city as subtext. No matter that director Clare Stopford had previously ferried Shakespeare to a localised environment with much success (her Twelfth Night […]

motive Chris McGreal The long-suffering people of the Democratic Republic of Congo have little inclination to dwell on how the bombs that kill their families and destroy their homes are delivered. The hundreds who died last year in Makanza, Goma or Kisangani might have fallen victim to aircraft from an array of countries. After all, […]

Browsing THE ANATOMIST by Federico Andahazi (Anchor) History is the book world’s next big thing. An Argentinian psychotherapist journeys to woman’s nether regions to relate the discovery of the clitoris by a 16th-century Italian physician. Although it is historical bunkum, it is a jolly magical realist jape. The heresy that Mateo Colombo commits kindles the […]