Charlotte Denny Uganda has added its voice to calls for an overhaul of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) heavily indebted poor countries initiative (HIPC). In a letter to British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Ugandan Finance Minister Gerald Ssendaula called for speedier debt relief. Currently, countries must spend six years on […]
Gary Younge talks to South Africans who are thinking of moving to greener pastures At the entrance to the Sandton library, John Gambarana is doing a roaring trade in fear. With the help of an overhead projector and a few corny jokes the emigration consultant has taken just one hour to craft a psychological narrative […]
Evidence wa ka Ngobeni The management of the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) has agreed to pay compensation to victims of vicious assaults by the protection services on the campus. RAU management has bowed to pressure from black students, who have called on the Human Rights Commission (HRC) to probe human rights violations against them. Last […]
John Matshikiza With the Lid Off Isn’t there a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm in which a young lad goes off into the world to seek his fortune, admonishing his old mother, who is not very bright, to make sure that she always locks the door securely when she goes out? And doesn’t the […]
A COMMERCIAL Bank of Malawi official has said that local and international investors are taking a “wait and see” approach to the June 15 elections. Fred Kanjo, the bank’s head of economic research, sayd investors have adopted a more cautious stance before making any firm investment decisions. Malawi has experienced a growth rate of about […]
Neil Manthorp in Amsterdam In time South Africa’s cricketers may reflect on the decision taken three weeks ago not to read any newspapers in England as one of the better ones during the World Cup campaign. Despite performances so compelling that not even English journalists could be disparaging, their coverage remains steadfastly tinged. The prevalent […]
Evidence wa ka Ngobeni An attempt to broker peace between two notorious Western Cape gangs by taking them to the mountains was sabotaged a week before it could start. The National Peace Accord Trust had arranged to take the rival gangster groups on a “transformation trail” in the Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal last week. The aim […]
Doris Lessing joined the communist party in Rhodesia, left two children to go to England, and then explored mysticism. Emma Brockes finds the iconoclastic author has a talent to explore, move on and surprise It was in a caf in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, that Doris Lessing received her first, rather clumsily delivered death threat. This […]
Stephen Gray FRAGILE HERITAGE: A ROCK ART FIELD GUIDE by David Lewis-Williams and Geoffrey Blundell (Witwatersrand University Press) The surface of the rock shelter overlooking the offices of this newspaper is blank these days; the bright gallery of San paintings that celebrated how the country had been for millennia has dimmed and eroded off. On […]
Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week I remember taking my first cap of LSD (it was only a quarter) in 1982 when I saw Steven Lisberger’s Tron, which had Jeff Bridges as a computer programmer caught up in a game. The drugs and, for that time, dazzling special effects seemed to cancel everything out. I […]