OWN CORRESPONDENT, East London | Thursday 5.00pm. THE touring England cricket team are studying videotapes of Lance Klusener in a bid to devise a method of coping with the South African’s batting prowess. Duncan Fletcher, the England coach, said before the start of the third test in Durban on Sunday that the tourists have caught […]

1 Jomo Sono 2 Richard Branson 3 Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin 4 The Shah of Iran and the King of Albania 5 South 6 Enigma 7 De Voortrekkers, in 1916 8 Lech Walesa 9 Macao 10 Chris Patten 11 The Watergate 12 Luciano Pavorotti, Jos Carreras and Placido Domingo 13 Emily Hobhouse 14 General Fulgencio Batista […]

TONY LEON: Democratic Party (official opposition) NATIONAL ASSEMBLY SEATS: 38 Grade: B- His Tonyness was hardly likely in Parliament to be able to match his performance in the election, and he has not. This is in part a price of success. Increasing your party’s National Assembly representation fivefold in a single election takes energy – […]

shook the world “Search in your past for what is good and beautiful. Build your future from there.” – Paul Kruger, 1902 “The only white race that has steadily been going backwards to barbarism.” – Sir Garnet Wolseley comments on the Boers during the Anglo-Boer South African War “E=mc2” (Energy equals mass times the speed […]

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 […]