The once-staid centre of Pretoria is bursting with cultural life waiting to be released, writes Charl Blignaut It’s a very different Church Square that we approach on a sweltering Sunday morning – and it’s not just that the drag queen trippling on the grass is drawing more attention from the startled pigeons than from the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

jail Ferial Haffajee The only son of Freedom Front leader Tienie Groene- wald, is in jail in Lisbon facing espionage charges. Pieter Hendrik Groenewald, a former rightwinger and Wit Wolf – a spent far right-wing organisation – was re- arrested in August soon after being released after a failed extradition attempt by the South African […]

Louise Viljoen VIR ‘N PERS HUIS by Karin Cronj (Human &Rousseau) Karin Cronj’s novel Vir ‘n Pers Huis starts with a scene in a supermarket. The narrator is overcome with disgust as she observes a woman who gorges herself on the Danish pastries she is loading into her shopping trolley, and cringes pathetically while selecting […]

Chiara Carter A campaign to fight xenophobia and raise awareness about refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants is to be launched next month. The campaign is part of a three-year strategy drawn up by a consultant commissioned by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). It is being spearheaded by the National Consultative Forum on Refugee […]

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 […]

Nevanji Madanhire The farce goes on at Town House, seat of the Harare City Council, but the government is reluctant to fire executive mayor Solomon Tawengwa. The city is tottering on the brink of collapse and all fingers point to one man. Recently, half the city went without water for three weeks and a quarter […]