Stephen Moss Jos Saramago has finally received his due from the Swedish Academy. Awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, he is the first writer in Portuguese to win the world’s most prestigious literary award. “I am very happy for myself,” he told a cheering crowd at the Frankfurt Book Fair. “But I am also […]

Hanekom The chief land claims commissioner says he is being made `a sacrificial beast’ as his remarks in Parliament embarrassed his minister, writes Wally Mbhele Chief land claims commissioner Joe Seremane broke his silence this week over tensions that have gripped the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights, saying that Minister of Agriculture and […]

The Basic Conditions of Employment Act applies to domestic workers too, writes Belinda Beresford Labour relations, like charity, begin at home. But unlike charitable acts, proper labour relations towards your maid, gardener, chauffeur or childminder are not voluntary. Before crime and emigration became the main topics of conversation among the chattering classes, complaining about domestic […]

Ferial Haffajee This week’s rate cut is a drop in the ocean. Wednesday’s decrease in the repo rate will have little significance for wider South Africa because commercial lenders are unlikely to follow suit immediately. But the small cut – one-quarter of a percentage point – in the interest rate at which the Reserve Bank […]

Tim Radford It is lunchtime in Europe or breakfast in New England and you are probably in middle life, maybe a great deal older. You are also a chemist, a physicist or a researcher who did something unequivocally important in medicine and physiology. Or you could be an economist, a politician or perhaps a writer, […]

Andy Capostagno Cricket It was the Somerset and England all- rounder Len Braund who refused a second benefit on the grounds that he had lost money on the first. And Bertie Buse, another Somerset man who coached for many years at King Edwards in Johannesburg, chose a three-day game at Bath for his benefit. Neglecting […]

Steve Gordon South African musicians at home and abroad will be saddened to learn of the death last week of guitarist Russell Herman, who died in London, where he had been living since the early 1980s. Born in Cape Town in 1953, Herman grew up in District Six, and was an integral part of the […]

WL Webb ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN: A CENTURY IN HIS LIFE by DM Thomas (Little, Brown) Somewhere in her great biography of her murdered poet-husband, Nadezhda Mandelstam quotes a 19th-century sage to the effect that “Russia exists to teach the rest of the world a lesson”. Whatever Freudian glosses one adds to his motivation, there is no […]

Giles Foden THE CATASTROPHIST by Ronan Bennett (Headline Review) Those who suspected Ronan Bennett of being a novelist who lets his political enthusiasms – Irish republicanism, social justice – rein in the impulse towards a more elastic, heartfelt fiction will not have their suspicions confirmed by his new novel. Set in Congo before and after […]

Peter Makurube Pops Mohamed has been to the desert – again! Mohamed’s relationship with the desert people, the Khoi Khoi, has led to several important projects. One of these is the soundtrack for Zola Maseko’s documentary on Sara Baartman. Mohamed has long been a campaigner for the preservation of indigenous music, particularly that of the […]