Alex Sudheim Poetry is one of the great human paradoxes. Consumed as we are by infinite labyrinths of emotion and thought, we have at our disposal but one rudimentary tool for the expression of our ephemeral selves: that famously deficient thing called language. As Samuel Beckett once pointed out: “Every word is an unnecessary stain […]

Adrienne Viljoen’s favourite saying is, “‘n Boer maak ‘n plan,” which she translates as “a man makes a plan”. As manager of the South African Bureau of Standards Design Institute, she believes that Africans have the innate ability to design solutions to day-to-day problems. “People are ingenious at solving problems, but they don’t think in […]

The French (who seem to do more for culture in South Africa than any state body) have a word for it. La bande dessine. The English term, “comics”, hardly does justice to the radiant variety of graphic narrative that has grown from “funnies” and superhero strips into an artform as complex and interesting as any […]

Ted Leggett As if the South African Police Service (SAPS) wasn’t in enough hot water over the filming of police brutality by BBC-TV, it recently had to deal with a series of attacks from the country’s deputy president. At an election rally in the Indian suburb of Chatsworth recently, a police member asked Thabo Mbeki […]

provinces Ian Clayton Plans by the African Natonal Congress to downgrade provincial governments in favour of stronger municipalities will result in a constitutional fight that the party is bound to lose unless it has a clean sweap of Parliament and provincial legislatures in the June 2 election. Even then, it will take a major rethink […]

THE Angolan state oil company, Sonangol, has signed a $575-million loan agreement with Union Bank of Switzerland, state television said in a broadcast monitored by the BBC. It said the four-year loan to Sonangol, backed by an oil sale contract between the Angolan oil company and British Petroleum, was signed in London on Tuesday.

Cathy Jenkins:A SECOND LOOK `Let me ask you, Reverend [Musa] Zondi, who should be prosecuted for stockpiling weapons and who should not? If we want the country to be governable, as the Inkatha Freedom Party says it wants to do, who do you think should be prosecuted whenever they transgress the law?” Tim Modise, interviewing […]

MORE than 200 students at a teachers’ college in Mpumalanga have won a battle for better food after boycotting the campus caterers for two days. Rector of Mgwenya College of Education, Ian Steenkamp said on Thursday that the 240 students would now get good meals. Students had complained that vegetarians, for example, were fed only […]

British newspapers have been `leaked’ damaging documents in what appears to be an elaborate plot to smear President Nelson Mandela, write Martin Welz and Mungo Soggot Several British newspapers have been probing a story that President Nelson Mandela accepted a kickback as part of a Nigerian oil deal. The allegations appear to be part of […]

Vic Marks Even those of us who groan about the proliferation of so-called one-day specialists in England’s World Cup squad do not quibble about the selection of Neil Fairbrother. He may be 35 years old, stuck with a Test average of 15 and and the owner of two disobedient hamstrings that often seem to twang […]