Bryan Rostron A Second Look Thabo Mbeki first prompted the comparison with talk of his renaissance. Italy has long baffled the Anglo-Saxon mind with its knack of reconciling contradictions, and today our new president displays an equally acrobatic flair for juggling opposites. Why, we now even have a pacifist as deputy minister of defence and […]
Cameron Duodu Letter From The North The late Joshua Nkomo is the sort of personality to which the world is exposed only once in a thousand years. A familiar figure in Accra in the early Sixties, when President Kwame Nkrumah was helping Africans everywhere to organise resistance against white rule, Nkomo could easily have passed […]
Yemi Toure Just when you thought it was safe to go into the jungles of Hollywood, along come the folks at Disney, swinging from the rafters with their film Tarzan. Disney’s official website describes how the studio came up with the image, the “look,” of the 1999 Tarzan. The studio wanted the character to be […]
Ros Coward Body Language Have you heard the one about why husbands are like lawn mowers? “Difficult to get started, emit foul smells and don’t work half the time.” It would be surprising if you hadn’t. In a culture where a man cracking similar jokes about women is instantly suspected of being a stalker, such […]
CD of the week Neil Spencer Mindless pop exhilaration doesn’t come fresher than Hey Boy Hey Girl, the current hit from Eng Lit students turned dance bermeisters, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons – better known as the Chemical Brothers. A slamming, joyful chunk of techno, it’s already a defining part of the soundtrack to the […]
A peace deal to end almost a decade of civil war in Sierra Leone has been signed. But, writes Mark Doyle, many feel that the rebels are being rewarded for atrocities In a muddy refugee camp in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, a two-year-old with her right arm amputated smiles a lot and seems unaware that […]
David Gough Ten years after the outbreak of civil war in Somalia, there is growing optimism in the capital, Mogadishu, that Islamic groups, in partnership with the business community, are on the verge of restoring a semblance of order to the city. In the past month Islamic militias operating under the auspices of self-appointed Islamic […]
Friday night Marianne Thamm Friday nights in the city are rather predictable. I’ve never really liked them. Most of us are generally too tired from the week’s toil to really let rip. There’s nothing brave about going out on a Friday night. Friday nights are for the faint- hearted. But Monday nights are another thing. […]
Mungo Soggot Police have raided Cape empowerment group Brimstone’s pharmaceutical arm for the second time this year, seizing a batch of stolen antibiotics. The swoop on Monday follows a high profile raid on the company in May, in which the narcotics squad confiscated stolen painkillers as well as assorted drugs allegedly destined for the state […]
Tangeni Amupadhi IN CONFLICT by Anthony Feinstein (David Philip) In Conflict is one man’s account of how he compromised his own beliefs to fight in defence of apartheid. Anthony Feinstein put off national service in the then South African Defence Force (SADF) by going straight from school to university, where he became increasingly convinced that […]