THE United Nations will facilitate upcoming talks in Togo between Sierra Leone rebel leader Foday Sankoh, facing execution for treason, and his field commanders, for peace in Sierra Leone, its envoy announced. UN Special Representative to Sierra Leone Francis Okello met President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah late Thursday and said that the United Nations will also […]

A ZAMBIAN magistrate on Friday charged with espoinage the 12 Postjournalists arrested last month. The journalists from the Post newspaper, who include the managing director and editor, Fred M’membe, were separately arrested and charged with espionage, which carries a minimum jail term of twenty years, after their paper carried a story comparing Zambia’s military capabilities […]

Westerners, whiteys, honkies, call them what you will, are often accused by Africans of a lack of understanding of their culture. While black South Africans have a measure of access to “white culture”, albeit as servants in houses, or in a corporate or industrial environment, white South Africans have little access to African lifestyles. Dancer […]

Shaun de Waal Johannesburg has plenty of room for second- hand bookshops, if the recent expansion of two groups is anything to go by. Eric Nofal and Irene Koch of Books Galore are about to open a new shop – their seventh – in the Hyperama Centre in Constantia Kloof, Weltevreden Park, and Doron Locketz, […]

Ian Clayton Minister of Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development Valli Moosa announced this week that the government’s allocation to local authorities would be R2,3-billion during the current financial year, an increase from the R2,1-billion allocated in the last financial year. Moosa added that local authorities with greater need would “gradually” receive more direct government aid […]

Ivor Powell Some time last year those in the inner circles of the African National Congress and the party’s official spin doctors took to referring to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, in a seemingly hubristic way, as “the president”. It was only when you challenged them, insisting that the president’s name was Nelson Mandela and that […]

RESPECTED journalist Max du Preez, the producer of the popular Special Assignment investigative programme, was fired by the SABC on Thursday. Du Preez was given his marching orders by editor-in-chief Phil Molefe on Thursday afternoon. “They said I am arrogant and don’t show respect,” Du Preez told Beeld . Last Saturday the programme, which will […]

A number of developments this week have offered yet another reminder of how fragile is our reliance on judges to hold society together. First of all we have had the Heath debacle. The “Caped Crusader” was humiliated twice over the past week. We had Trevor Manuel playing cat and mouse with him, making fun of […]

How do you feel when a white woman looks at you and tightens the grip on her sling-bag, sure that all you have on your mind are her possessions? Like an African male, that’s how. This, to be sure, is how many white people think of you: a crime about to happen. And that is […]

Barbara Ludman EX-LIBRIS by Ross King (Vintage) Isaac Inchbold is a bookseller in 1660s London, summoned to a crumbling house on a ruined estate and commissioned to find a book missing since the start of the Thirty Years War. The library is magnificent. Collected by an adventurer who smuggled the books out of Prague ahead […]