Cuban music’s local cult status is soaring with the re-release of some legendary jam sessions by Cuba’s greatest musos, writes Peter Makurube Born of a country in which politics and passion are the order of the day, Cuban music has always enjoyed cult status in South Africa. But its following grew to massive proportions last […]

This week’s Mail & Guardian comes with a new set of features designed to make Africa’s best read even better. l Writer, movie director and semi- retired actor John Matshikiza kicks off a new column, With the Lid Off. Those with long memories will remember this was the title of the regular column his father, […]

force Belinda Beresford The furore surrounding a Hartebeespoort landowner who gave some of his land away has spurred on the local council, farmers and developers to undertake to provide 1 000 black families in the area with their own houses by the new millennium. Already 14 developers have promised to donate land for housing – […]

bloodshed Chris McGreal The KwaZulu-Natal town of Richmond is bracing itself for another bout of bloodshed this weekend with the funerals of assassinated United Democratic Movement secretary general and warlord Sifiso Nkabinde and those killed in a revenge attack on an African National Congress family attending a funeral vigil. Nkabinde’s right-hand man and probable successor […]

Widow Product:BLACK WIDOW V3.63 by SoftByte Lab If you’ve gone through the tedious process of trying to save an entire website on to your hard drive file by file, you probably got the jitters thinking about your telephone bill. And if you discovered afterwards that suddenly all those images you painstakingly saved cannot be viewed […]

Making just one of the millions of proteins we manufacture every day involves copying the recipe from DNA, ferrying the building block to a kind of biological knitting machine, threading the blocks into a chain, folding the chain into complex shapes and finally adding various chemical identity tags. At every stage, things can go wrong. […]

THE Democratic Party scooped the municipal by-election at the former National Party stronghold of Kraaifontein in the Western Cape on Thursday. DP candidate Fanie Jacobs stormed in 531 votes ahead of independent candidate Deon Basson with 364. The New National Party candidate Wilfred Hambly came in a distant third with 250 votes.

PRESIDENT Nelson Mandela’s wife, Graa Machel, received an award on Thursday from the Council of Europe’s North-South Centre in recognition of the role she has played in protecting human rights and democracy. The 1998 North-South Prize was to be handed over at a ceremony in Strasbourg, France, during the Council of Europe’s parliamentary session. Machel […]

David Shapshak In countless B-grade science fiction films, the villain was foiled in his attempt to shoot the hero with his own gun because the “smart” gun would only allow itself to be fired by the rightful owner. For the technophiles, this was explained as the gun having an embedded sensor that read the hero’s […]

Andy Capostagno Cricket There was a time when umpires were like good little children – they were seen and not heard. In the good old days there were 13 people on the field, two of them made the decisions and if those decisions were wrong the only people who knew were the 13 in the […]