`Stand by to drop. Drop now!” Two tons of water crash on flames. And the Oryx helicopter crew returns to the nearby dam to take on the next load. “You’re in the smoke most of the time. You can’t see most of the time. If there are power lines or telephone wires, it’s a whole […]

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 […]

JOHANNESBURG businessman Tony Teixeira has demanded an apology from British foreign office minister Peter Hain, after the South African-born Hain named Teixeira as being involved in breaking United Nations sanctions against Angolan rebel movement Unita. Hain made the claim in the British House of Commons earlier this week, when he named three international businessmen as […]

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 […]

FRENCH clubs will be hardest hit by the biennial showcase of African football with more than 40 first and lower-division players getting national team call ups for the African Nations Cup.

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 […]

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, […]

INJURY has ruled Jonty Rhodes out of South Africa’s first match in the triangular one-day series on Friday. The hamstring problem which put Rhodes out of the fifth and final test against England at Centurion Park earlier this week will also keep the middle order batsman out of the game against Zimbabwe at the Wanderers […]