Shaun de Waal The books that most profoundly shaped the thought of this century were written before it began – Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Each in its way was at the epicentre of a movement that rippled out […]

SPORADIC heavy gunfire was heard before dawn on Wednesday on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Sierra Leonean Information Minister Julius Spencer said the strikes were a “pre-emptive” measure by troops of the Nigerian-led Ecomog intervention force. “Everything is under control and there is no danger to the capital,” Spencer said in a local radio […]

Paul Kirk, Nalisha Kalideen, Fiona Macleod, Marianne Merten and Connie Selebogo spoke to the parents of five children born this year ‘I want her to have all the choices she wants,” says 24-year-old Waleed Ajouhaar, a young father from gang- ridden Manenberg on the Cape Flats. His daughter, Aiesha, was born on November 19 and […]

The United Nations marked the 1990s as a decade for natural disaster reduction, but 1999 has been one of the worst on record. Tim Radford reports Here is how to become a disaster statistic. Move to a shanty town on an unstable hillside near a tropical coast. Crowd together as more and more people arrive. […]

The theatres may have been empty, but 1999 saw massive new audiences for television and music, writes Charl Blignaut Television One day near the beginning of 1999 a producer at Generations was called to reception at the SABC studio to “deal with a situation”. Waiting for him with a letter in her hand was an […]

barbarians Millennial fears of Y2K chaos and resulting social disorder are merely expressions of intense political anxieties, writes Bryan Rostron ‘Imagine,” said the minister’s adviser, pointing at the sprawling squatter settlement on the mountain opposite my home, “as clocks tick over to 2000, if government computers crash, power failures, communications, police and army disoriented.” He […]

POLICE have reported an increase in drownings in rivers and dams in Gauteng since the beginning of the festive season, and say the figures seem likely to double last year’s. Last year, 15 people drowned between December 1 and January 3. Some of the drownings are attributed to drunkenness, while others would have been prevented […]

‘He, which hath no stomach to this fight / Let him depart, his passport shall be made / And crowns for convoy put into his purse: / We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us” -Henry V’s Crispian Day speech at Agincourt, by William Shakespeare There […]

Isabel Hilton Jiang Zemin, president of the People’s Republic of China, can look back on 1999 with some satisfaction: it was the year in which he began to make his bid for immortality, his place in the pantheon of Chinese leaders, alongside Mao and Deng. So far, he could say to himself, so good. Some […]

Robert Kirby We approach the end of the century and it’s nowhere to be found. The long- awaited, enviously portentous but never threatening: the Great South African Novel is yet to be written. It’s not that there hasn’t been a wealth of human experience in this country. This century kicked off with a boisterous local […]