OWN CORRESPONDENT, London | Thursday 4.45pm. SOUTH African centre Andre Snyman says the world champions are being cheated by referees and has slammed the way they are being treated by rugby officials. The 25-times capped centre, in Britain with the rest of the touring South African squad, said: “We feel penalised more than any other […]

John Perlman Nick Mallett doesn’t look worried. “It’s a very nice problem I have,” says the Springbok coach of the fact that his back row, widely seen as the finest in rugby, currently excludes a 22-year-old more and more people regard as potentially the finest loose forward in the world. Bobby Skinstad doesn’t seem too […]

Howard Barrell Armed rebels are making skilful use of rainy season in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo to push back President Laurent Kabila’s army and allied Angolan, Namibian and Zimbabwean forces, say intelligence sources and security analysts. The rebels, familiar with local conditions, have been pressing forward mainly on foot in the […]

Links to Executive Outcomes may have made an Angolan mining company a target for attack, writes Chris Gordon DiamondWorks, whose Yetwene mine in north- eastern Angola was attacked last week, may have been a target because of the links of its parent company, British-based Branch Energy, to the South African mercenary company, Executive Outcomes. Branch […]

Sharon Hammond Driving south of Malelane, in Mpumalanga, into a land of sugar cane fields and burnt- out minibus taxis, you enter a world where women own nothing and get little respect or recognition from men. “Even if you work and buy something with your own money, it’s not yours, it’s your husband’s,” explains a […]

CD of the week : Caroline Sullivan Supposedly, PJ(Polly Jean) Harvey doesn’t have a phone in her Dorset house. But it takes a singular talent to come up with gems like her last album, 1995’s To Bring You My Love, and for Harvey reclusiveness seems to spark the creative process. It’s worked again on Is […]

Mercedes Sayagues `I sing the body electric,” wrote Walt Whitman. I am reminded of this line as I watch the bulging biceps, palpitating pecs and throbbing quads of Vaughan Carl, Mr Zimbabwe Bodybuilder 1998. Harare’s 700-seat Seven Arts theatre is half-full for the finals of Mr and Ms Zimbabwe Bodybuilder. Mr Zimbabwe 1996 is the […]

Review of the week : Brenda Atkinson Roger van Wyk, all Capetonian cool and soft round vowels and mad professor hair, has had two espressos, and he’s on a roll, his lucid rapid-fire monologue dragging my morning brain into foreign terrain. In Van Wyk’s world, the world of Transmission – his show at the Rembrandt […]

Jim White : A Second Look Brian Lara is renowned in cricket as an active disciple of the Geoffrey Boycott school: nothing matters as much as himself, or rather his bank balance. Yet in an affair which initially seemed little more than another piece of financial brinkmanship by the world’s most gifted batsman, it is […]

Ann Eveleth : In the Act Civilian victims of the latest series of conflicts afflicting Southern Africa will welcome the news that South Africa’s first- ever Refugees Bill is rapidly traversing the corridors of power. More than three decades after anti-colonial and civil wars first engulfed the region – creating large numbers of refugees – […]