Fiona Macleod A deal being hammered out with the southern Kalahari Bushmen will entitle them to jointly own and manage more than 1 000km2 of the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in the Northern Cape. It will also add about 500km2 on to the park. If the deal goes through – and there are indications it […]

David Shapshak Spending It In science fiction, functional technology has long been integrated into mainstream culture as fashion. Technology has often been reinvented as fashion, witness what Bang & Olafsson have done for the dour hi-fi or Apple’s iMac for the home personal computer. The cellphone, that once distinctive sign of a yuppie, is going […]

Friday night: Shaun de Waal Last Friday the charming Brad Holmes opened his Melville jazz club, the Bassline, in the late afternoon for the Mail & Guardian’s annual Christmas staff party. This was an informal bash – the Mail had only pocket money left after the office-warming of our new building earlier in the year. […]

Tangeni Amupadhi A band of robbers and kill-ers is terrorising African immigrants in Johannesburg in what appears to be a systematic elimination of the foreign nationals. The latest casualty was Djo Ongonga Okamba from Brazzaville, the capital of Congo. He was shot dead last week, days before he was to leave for his home town. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Jim McClellan surfs his way to spirituality on the Web Looking to live up to the proclamations of business experts, who have declared that this Christmas online shopping will cross over to the mainstream (at least in the United States), Net retailers seem to be going all out to exploit the seasonal spirit. However, there […]

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 […]

Andrew Worsdale The Great Escape, a fascinating documentary airing on SABC1 at 6.30pm on Sunday December 20, tells the story of the famous Marshall Square jailbreak in 1963 where activists Arthur Goldreich, Mosie Moolla, Charlie Jasset and Harold Wolpe managed to persuade warder Johan Greef to let them out with the promise of payment. Greef […]

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 […]