roams Justin Pearce The bakkie still rules in the Karoo. By 8am on election day, the Nissans and Isuzus of the Sutherland district begin bearing their cargo of voters to the polls – each with a white farmer at the wheel and coloured farm workers in the back. They travel along long dirt roads where […]

THURSDAY, 11.30AM: DESPITE a slight increase in new vehicle sales from April, May sales fell sharply compared to the corresponding period in 1997, reflecting the overall sluggishness in the economy and uncertainty in international markets. The National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa now expects that an anticipated recovery in the vehicle sales market […]

Gavin Dudley With the recent media emphasis on global telecommunications, meaning that more people around the world are in touch more of the time, we could reasonably expect our cellphones to continue working wherever we are in the world. Sadly this is still not the case, though this is not a limitation of telecommunications technology, […]

living from the soil Ian Clayton Out of a population of 180-million in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), only one in 10 has a job in the formal sector and only about 20% of the economically active population have jobs, a Norwegian researcher, Liv Torres, has established. This gives an unemployment rate of nearly […]

David le Page Free cellphones are subsidised by the cost of the contract – that’s why you generally need to take out a 24-month contract, and why cellphones are often locked so they can only be used on one network. Which raises some obvious questions. How much do contracts cost if you’re not buying a […]

Drive-in movies are about to take on a whole new meaning as in-car entertainment gets under way. Ashley Norris reports Forget I-Spy! If the kids in the back of your car are restless, you’ll soon be able to entertain them with Rugrats: The Movie on digital versatile disc (DVD) in cinema-style surround sound. In the […]

Anthony Egan TREVOR HUDDLESTON: A LIFE by Robin Denniston (Macmillan) For a figure of such importance to the anti-apartheid struggle, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston has been largely overlooked as a subject for biography. His life has largely been told through his own writings – which combine Anglo-Catholic theology, militant anti-racism and an anecdotal style – or […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby We should be used to it by now, but it doesn’t make it any easier: how is it possible to pick a winner in a competition where the best players are only sporadically available? The Lions won the Vodacom Cup because, what with bottomless bank accounts and one thing and another, they […]

pesticides Mercedes Sayagues Activists are battling to stop a Danish- funded project to burn pesticides in a dilapidated cement factory in Matola, near Maputo. Burning toxic waste in cement kilns creates dangerous cancer-causing compounds known as dioxins and furans. Strict standards must be maintained for safety. It is doubtful whether the Portuguese-owned factory, which has […]

Howard Barrell Over a Barrel And how, I was musing aloud on the road back from the election counting centre in Pretoria, do opposition parties begin to contend for power? “By getting bigger,” responded my colleague, Mungo Soggot. And how do they get bigger? “By winning more votes, of course.” And how do they do […]