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 […]

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 […]

Zimbabwe has joined the grim club of police states, writes Mercedes Sayagues Zimbabwe’s government is showing its true colours, and the hue is the olive green of a military dictatorship. In the past two weeks, basic democratic principles have been crudely disregarded: the military declared itself above the law and institutional torture reared its ugly […]

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.

The collapse of Tollgate, the Cape- based conglomerate of which Julian Askin was chair and principal shareholder, and the subsequent examination into its failure have produced one of the most torrid, unpleasant and seamy corporate chapters in South Africa’s history. Formerly a South African resident, Askin mixed a career as a journalist with occasional stockbroking. […]

early John Matshikiza:WITH THE LID OFF I know it is almost February, and the year is ticking by, but I have just woken up to the fact that it really is 1999. That the Y2K madness has officially been allowed to take over as a substitute for logic in our times, that Nelson Mandela is […]

Germaine Greer:SITE SEEING I’m not impressed with the general availability of books online. I’m glad a United Kingdom edition of Amazon’s online bookshop was launched because it was infuriating not being able to buy books from UK distributors on the United States site. But I find this site slow. Virtually all its titles are available […]

William Leith A MONK SWIMMING by Malachy McCourt (HarperCollins) In Angela’s Ashes, the bestselling autobiography by Frank McCourt, Frank’s younger brother Malachy appears first as a grimy urchin, and then as an older version of one. In A Monk Swimming, the younger brother’s memoir, Frank flits through the action in a correspondingly sensible, buttoned-up fashion. […]

world stage Belinda Beresford Reminiscent of a blonde Benoni bombshell, Old Mutual is to export itself on to the international stage and have an image overhaul. Whether the change from a South African mutual society to an internationally listed company brings it the same success that moving to Hollywood has done for Charlize Theron remains […]

TWO elephants were shot dead in a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare on Wednesday, national radio reported. National Parks rangers killed the jumbos after they injured a man when they wandered into the Bluff Hill suburb, which is surrounded by farmland. The death of the elephants is certain to cause an outcry from conservationists, who […]