Hector Petersen’s name is synonymous with the 1976 riots, but what happened to the man carrying him in that famous picture? Andrew Worsdale reports Director Feizel Mamdoo’s startling documentary What Happened to Mbuyisa? is the first South African movie to be invited to participate in the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, the most prestigious event […]

Planning your retirement is your responsibility, writes Michael Metelits The dream of retirement is to spend your golden years savouring life and doing things you never had time to enjoy when working – the soft-focus approach favoured by advertising agencies. But a prerequisite is enough money, otherwise you can fall into a grim and grey […]

from the inquest courts Leading human rights lawyer George Bizos has written an account of inquests into the deaths of people who died in detention under apartheid. This is an edited extract from the book After its passage through Parliament in 1963, the detention without trial law soon claimed its first victim. On August 20 […]

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 […]

rampage Elias Chitenje Trigger-happy security officers have turned Zambia into a killing field while at the same time stripping civilians of their illegal weapons. Unofficial sources put the number of suspects gunned down in cold blood by police and other security officers in the past month at more than 20. The indiscriminate killings reached unprecedented […]

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 […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni The rector of Technikon South Africa (TSA), Adriaan Buitendacht, is paid an annual salary of nearly R1-million. And he is scheduled to get a salary increase next year. Discontent is running high among workers, labour unions and senior staff at TSA about the “purported extravagant” salaries paid to top management, especially […]

Ann Eveleth A white Hartebeespoort landowner staged a hunger strike this week to force the conservative local council to kick-start low-cost housing for about 50 000 black residents of this picturesque getaway outside Pretoria. Broederstroom smallholder Roger Roman launched his lone hunger strike and sit- in in front of the Hartebeespoort council offices on Wednesday. […]

Robin McKie It is the Holy Grail of physics, and it has eluded scientists for the past 30 years. Now researchers believe they are on the threshold of detecting the most elusive force in the cosmos: gravity waves. But if they find the waves do not exist, that would still be significant: it would prove […]

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 […]