Ivor Powell Nosizwe Madlala-Routledge, the newly appointed deputy minister of defence, is no militaristic hawk or securocrat. She’s a self-professed pacifist – and a practising member of the Society of Friends or Quaker movement. She is married to Jeremy Routledge, the director of the Quaker Peace Centre in Cape Town. In the 1980s the centre […]
John Matshikiza With The Lid Off I met Danny Glover in the Sheraton hotel in Harare in 1986. It was a bitterly cold winter’s morning, the sun had not yet come up, and we were gathering in the lobby of the hotel, waiting to go on to the set to shoot a made-for-TV movie called […]
wave David Gough in Nairobi Armed vigilante groups are springing up throughout the Kenyan capital in response to a rising crime rate that has made the once peaceful city one of the most dangerous in Africa. Community leaders say that chronic unemployment, a corrupt and ineffective police force, increases in food prices and rising levels […]
John Sutherland George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which was released in South Africa this week, generated so much hype worldwide there was bound to be a backlash. One character, Jar Jar Binks, a computer-birthed frogboy, has been indicted of that most heinous culture crime: racist stereotyping. Jar Jar (created on screen by “animatics”) […]
Fiona Macleod Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi- Mahanyele is talking about starting a revolution in her second term of office. “We’ve laid the foundations, the building blocks are in place and a social revolution is about to start,” she says. “Our society is changing, and housing is one of the factors contributing towards that change.” […]
RESCUE services were searching the sea off Angola’s southwest coast on Wednesday after a helicopter carrying a senior Angolan government official and at least four other people failed to arrive at its destination, an official said. Deputy Interior Minister Dario Ngongo was on board a police helicopter that left Luanda on Tuesday en route to […]
The G8 nations have pledged a $100-billion debt relief package. Gary Younge reports from Mozambique, one of the first countries in line for such relief. Julius Nyerere Avenue in Maputo starts on the shores of the Indian Ocean and runs in a more-or-less straight line towards apparent prosperity. The road stretches past the palatial Polana […]
Shaun de Waal Low-budget movie of the week In Rose Troche’s debut feature, Go Fish, a lesbian is put on “trial” by her peers for daring to contemplate the idea of sex with a man. This scene seemed to confirm some viewers’ worst fears about lesbians, but Troche’s intention was indubitably satirical. Her satire, though, […]
David le Page Finding out that there is a special cellphone service for deaf people was a little puzzling. After all, surely any phone with a vibrating alarm, which is pretty standard, and a normal short message service (SMS) – just as standard- can work perfectly well as a wireless communicator for deaf people? Sure […]
PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki and Organisation of African Unity secretary-general Salim Ahmed Salim will address a conference on the theme of an African revival in Johannesburg in October, organisers said on Thursday. Former South African and Tanzanian presidents Nelson Mandela and Julius Nyerere, as well as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, are among those who have […]