Preview of the week: Anton Marshall `Hey, have you heard of Renaissance?” I ask experimentally, honestly believing the hype that clubbers are in and slacker journos are out. “Er … Wasn’t that a Leonardo da Vinci painting?” she replies innocently, sipping on a Mule as her low- key rave vest struggles to find a cling […]

Mukoni T Ratshitanga Athol Fugard may have been writing about inhabitants of the electricity department’s disused building in downtown Johannesburg had the characters of his People are living there not been too few and employed. The inhabitants of the building belonging to the Market Theatre Company – where Fugard’s play premiered in March 1977 – […]

Ferial Haffajee Deputy president Thabo Mbeki and Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting Jay Naidoo have been drawn into the e.tv fray. Warring factions in the Midi consortium – which owns e.tv – have reportedly approached their offices to seek intervention in the new channel’s internal and external battles. The approaches to government have provoked […]

Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH Reader, if you missed last week’s “penalty shoot-out” in, of all places, the red-leather sumptuousness of Britain’s ancient House of Lords – where the Law Lords decided by a three to two majority that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has no “immunity” and must be sent to Spain to […]

no African renaissance’ Despite its limited resources, South Africa stands to gain by developing its own HIV vaccine, instead of waiting for the West to provide, writes Lesley Cowling More than 25 clinical trials of different types of vaccines against HIV – the virus that causes Aids – are under way all over the world. […]

Nicoli Nattrass It is economically illiterate and shockingly ill-informed to argue that we cannot afford to give pregnant women AZT. This is apparent from the most basic cost-benefit analysis. Taking the narrowest possible approach, the government simply has to ask whether the cost of administering AZT is more or less than the costs of treating […]

Anthony Holiday: OVER A BARREL Two terms in our current political lexicon are in urgent need of clarification. They are, of course, racialism and liberalism. The former refers to the gravest of matters, having to do with virtually everything the struggle for national liberation aimed to eliminate. However, it is now invariably an epithet, used […]

A new television series will put figures from South Africa’s past on trial. Matthew Krouse reports Santarama Miniland, on the shores of Wemmer Pan dam, is an unexpected setting for a historical television drama of high integrity. A mammoth Gulliver hovers over tiny replicas of apartheid-era monuments, rekindling memories of brainwashing school outings. Shored up […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday 7.00pm. ERNIE ELS, Tiger Woods and last year’s winner Nick Price will make their appearance as favourites at the Sun City Million Dollar Golf challenge which starts on Thursday. The three are part of the competition’s strongest-ever field, which includes six of the top seven players in the world. Woods, […]

SARAH BULLEN, Johannesburg | Tuesday 6.30pm. IT was an “utterly miserable” day on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as it shook off the sleepy mode of late and headed into a free-fall that saw just under 5% shaved off the market value. Dealers were largely bracing for a downturn on Tuesday morning after Wall Street’s two […]