Over the past 100 years sport has changed from a mere pastime to a multibillion-rand industry, writes Julia Beffon Before 1900 the word “sport” hardly existed in the context we now know it: amateurs played games, or excelled in one or other semi-military discipline, but few made physical exercise a career. Today sport is a […]

South African film production began with the Anglo-Boer War – and remained in the trenches, writes AndrewWorsdale Cut to SouthEAfrica at the beginning of the century. The country is at the forefront of film-making internationally. No one in the industry is bitching about viability. It’s really Hollyveld, and it’s amazing. Given the dreary state of […]

Aaron Nicodemus PERSON OF THE YEAR … CHARLENE SMITH Charlene Smith’s home has become a national clearing house for information on rape and Aids. She receives five or six calls a day from rape survivors, asking for help and support. She gets calls from government officials, women’s groups, doctors, policemen, insurance companies, men married to […]

Andy Capostagno It should have been the best of times, but far too often it was the worst of times. Australians will not remember the cricket and rugby world cups of 1999 in such negative terms, but the truth hurts. Here were two tournaments four years in the making, on comfortable growth curves from successful […]

Fiona Macleod The pendulum swings for 594 plant species, 14 animal species, 62 bird species and dozens of insect species in Southern Africa at the turn of the millennium. Already in the past couple of centuries, at least 59 Southern African species are known to have become extinct. The list includes 53 plants, two butterflies, […]

Unless policymakers put their money where their mouths are, the position of women in the new century looks set to be as bleak as the previous one, writes Khadija Magardie Decades have passed and generations have grown up since the feminist movement first burst on to the world arena, promising women change and revolution in […]

Two thousand years of Christianity is too much, yet somehow not quite enough, argues Shaun de Waal The year 2000 looms. What are we celebrating, or about to celebrate? Two millennia of Christianity? Or a triumph of marketing in which we’ve forgotten the product but been dazzled by the catchphrase? Not that it really is […]

In the mid-1800s, it was derided by Europe as an ‘experiment in gross vulgarity’. Today, it bestrides the world culturally, economically, technologically and militarily. Christopher Hitchens charts the unstoppable rise of the United States Who looks at an American book?” asked the Reverend Sydney Smith scornfully in the Edinburgh Review of the mid- Victorian epoch. […]

It was a momentous year. The gold price collapsed; the first black Reserve Bank governor took the helm; the face of black empowerment was changed forever; and privatisation was propelled to the top of the economic agenda, write Donna Block and Mungo Soggot Gold, the metal that defined South Africa in the twentieth century, went […]

More than 99 years of scientific progress has been tracked by the Nobel Prize, writes David Le Page It is unlikely any scientist ever began research with an eye on the Stockholm academies administering the prizes founded by dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. But their stature and heritage has come to make them an incontrovertible map […]