DAY ONE (Thursday) Dagga Makes The World Go Round `Follow!” yells the bored, overweight prison guard as he slams shut the outer door of Pretoria Local’s first floor. “Follow! Follow! Follow!” He moves down the line counting the 25 “new ones” that are hastily kneeling in twos on the floor along the outer wall of […]
Matthew Krouse Down the tube When did we become a nation obsessed with yacking? Presently there are no fewer than nine chat shows on TV, four of which get repeated, consuming about 15 hours of viewing time a week. The American ones all look the same – wide stages bulging with interesting furniture, portable screens […]
The public protector’s decision to assist a highly paid academic who was suspended and sacked for financial impropriety and abuse of power is one of the low points of the watchdog’s first stint in office. Selby Baqwa spent 13 months intervening in the disciplinary probe of the academic, the former vice-chancellor of the Vaal Technikon, […]
Progressive policies are needed to make the Klein Karoo festival more inclusive, writes Lauren Shantall It’s the only place where Bles Bridges performs solo inside Joshua Doore. Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson take their energetic physical theatre to the streets amid placards bearing questions like “Waar’s Ons Volkstaat?” brandished by black performance artists. It’s a […]
Nato air attacks on Serbian military targets continue in what is clearly a paradoxical exercise: the emphasis on air intervention has worsened Serbian attacks on Kosovar military and civilians, bringing the prospect of Nato ground intervention to establish control – peacemaking – imminent; and the expanded Serbian repression has increased Kosovar support for independence, a […]
Loose cannon:Robert Kirby Carl Jung called it synchronicity, the acausal relationship between events. Two completely unrelated things I read last week seemed suddenly to fit that bill. The one was a book by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, called Lenin’s Embalmers, and the other was Minister Jay Naidoo’s lengthy Right to Reply, published in denial […]
EASY PEASY by Lesley Glaister (Bloomsbury) Easy Peasy takes its title from a children’s chant, but taunts in this narrative move from the playful to the spiteful and eventually to outright cruelty. The victim is a 10-year-old deaf boy, Vassily. The action alternates between the past of childhood and the present when the adult Griselda […]
you shall reap I wish to respond to Farid Esack’s condemnation of Judge John Foxcroft’s ruling against Allan Boesak (“Used and discarded like a condom”, March 26 to April 1). As a religious teacher and gender commissioner whose primary concern should be with establishing the rule of law and morality in a country where crime […]
Andy Colquhoun Rugby The Stormers should have been given a ticker- tape parade down Adderley Street when they arrived back in Cape Town earlier this week. Wins Down Under by South African sides occur only as frequently as Fiji fail to win the Hong Kong Sevens – which is to say almost never. The storm […]
Acclaimed South African comedienne Irini Stephanou gets to the heart of leading Greek tragedienne, Lydia Koniordou Lydia Koniordou has been hailed as the greatest contemporary tragedienne in Greece. In the ancient theatre of Epidaurus in Greece, she has commanded audiences of 13 000 people. Her reputation is based solely on her work in the theatre. […]