Eikenhof Three … Bryan Rostron Both Judge Piet van der Walt’s response to the Eikenhof Three bail application and the disarray of evidence in the scandal display uncanny similarities to the many notorious miscarriages of justice that came to light in Britain during the 1990s. In cases such as the “Guildford Four” and “Birmingham Six”, […]

Fine Art: Tracey Murinik Willie Bester, Louis Jansen van Vuuren and Zwelethu Mthethwa form a rather unexpected and somewhat unlikely trio at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town this month. They have come together not only to exhibit their own respective works but also to collaborate on a number of pieces which […]

Maureen Barnes Down the tube Without wishing to rub salt into e.tv’s wounds, I noticed that all the recent press schedules for the troubled service show a daily half hour news bulletin at 7pm which hasn’t yet materialised. In its place was a British sitcom, the name of which I don’t know, followed by a […]

dream in tatters Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH There are few countries whose near- destruction, through civil war, has pained me as much as that of Guinea- Bissau. This country fired my imagination in the early 1970s, for although its population was less than a million, it became – together with its sister, the […]

The David Gleason Column This is the last column I shall write this year – and I have to say I’m rather glad 1998 has come to a writing end. It has been a brutal year for me personally, but also for many thousands of South Africans who have been trampled upon, caught by the […]

David Shapshak A flamethrower system fitted to cars to ward off hijackers has attracted huge international attention. In the same week South Africa hit the headlines with the discovery of a 3,5- million-year-old skeleton, a local entrepreneur was attracting nearly as much attention for an entirely different reason. Charl Fourie’s flamethrower will launch a fireball […]

Preview of the week: Matthew Krouse Ennio Marchetto, the living cartoon strip, doesn’t need to press buttons in order to transform himself into the 50 famous characters in his show. Present-day computer animators may perform God-like acts in television studios that double up as laboratories for human cloning, but this Venetian mime achieves the impossible […]

Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL What’s in a word? Probably not a great deal more than the user puts into it. The idea of rigid definitions is discredited, and the way in which a word is commonly used is little more than a rough guide to its meaning. So it is often not easy to […]

Andrew Worsdale Movies of the week I once worked at Film Fun, renting out 16mm movies. With a host of films to choose from, my favourite was Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson. A gambling movie set in New Orleans in the 1930s, I must have watched it five […]

Harriet Lane NOTES FROM A BIG COUNTRY by Bill Bryson (Doubleday) Bill Bryson, an American who settled in North Yorkshire and wrote – affectionately and very successfully – about the vagaries of the British, appears to have moved back to the States almost by accident. Having written 77 Mail on Sunday columns about the eccentricities […]