Former Zimbabwean president Canaan Banana skipped bail and fled to Botswana, days before the Harare High Court found him guilty on 11 sex charges. Banana was found guilty in absentia on Thursday on two charges of sodomy, seven of indecent assault and two of committing unnatural acts. Sentencing will take place on December 10, and […]

Saliem Fakir A Second Look There were great expectations about the appointment in March, by Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Pallo Jordan, of a board of investigation into the management of nature conservation. The board was headed by Judge Mark Kumleben. It represented, symbolically at least, an avenue for conservationists both to chastise the […]

Chiara Carter Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s brother is one of the missing African National Congress guerrillas whose fate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to establish while probing human rights abuses committed at the ANC’s notorious Quatro camp. Commissioners at an in-camera hearing earlier this year questioned General Andrew Masondo, the former ANC Angola commissar, […]

Ferial Haffajee At the front line of the corruption battle in Gauteng, Barbara van Jaarsveld has bagged a rotten principal. Her quiet schoolmarm demeanour gives way momentarily to a victorious grin. The principal will be charged for renting out his school’s electricity to 10 surrounding shacks. “He ran extension chords from the school and charged […]

Wonder Hlongwa A war of words has erupted between the head of Crawford College in Johannesburg and the Muslim parents of a suspended 14- year-old girl. Layla Cassim, a grade eight pupil at the mostly Jewish college, was suspended because of an essay her history teacher asked to her write about the conflict in the […]

In the third report of his series on transformation, John Matisonn examines changes in the media after 1990 In the SABC’s radio archive, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s first speech on his return to Russia in 1917 survived 46 years of apartheid censorship. Lenin’s speech was still in the files in February 1994 when, after the SABC’s […]

Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH Who knows cricket who only cricket knows? This question, penned by the late West Indian writer CLR James, would not have made any sense to me when I first went to live in Britain in 1983. On previous sojourns in England, friends had tried to get me interested in […]

Maureen Barnes Down the tube David Attenborough seems to spend his working life these days doing voice- overs for the work of other naturalists, which presumably is supposed to lend some sort of intellectual credibility to a production. On a mediocre production this could be said to be misleading to the viewer, and on good […]

Donna Block: SHARE WORLD Just when you thought it was safe for a little dip in the world’s financial waters it appears that those sharks of Wall Street, the hedge funds, are preparing a new feeding frenzy. Hungry after a three-month absence from the international investment scene, the funds are hunting for opportunities to engorge […]

Friday night: Dave Chislett Ten years ago, much against my will, I spent two hormone-fuelled years in Port Elizabeth completing my high school career. As a Johannesburg boy, recently transplanted to the coast, I hated the place. My nickname for it at the time was PE-nis by the sea. Now, my good friend Hagen Engler […]