As the Nobel Prize brings attention to Portuguese literature, Stephen Gray looks at a poet with a South African connection Ten years ago in these pages, Carmel Rickard reported from downtown Durban on the unveiling of a plaque in honour of the centenary of Fernando Pessoa’s birth. This, in turn, was at the foot of […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby With The Truman Show about to overrun our cinemas there will be those who look upon the final weekend of log fixtures in the Currie Cup as another example of media manipulation. Griquas play the Falcons, Western Province play Natal and the Blue Bulls play Free State. In terms of log positions, […]

Loose cannon: Robert Kirby Sometimes journalists actually do get that whopping Sisyphean boulder to the top of the hill. It takes a great deal of heaving and huffing, but eventually down it tumbles, taking the Emmanuel Shaws, the Jesse Duartes with it. It needed literally dozens of press, radio and television boulders to coax, motivate, […]

retrenchments Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Final examinations at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) hang in the balance this year following ongoing unrest on the campus. Examinations have been postponed for two weeks, but the administration has not yet set a date for them to begin. In an extraordinary move, UWC’s senate has censured […]

Maureen Barnes Down the tube Two local programmes gave me the worst case of dyspepsia in the past week. First came Top Billing, which has a certain jolliness about it -but it then confronted us with a profile on Edith Venter. Many readers outside Gauteng will be muttering “Who dat?” – which would undoubtedly depress […]

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 […]

A new satellite network to satisfy our need to keep in touch may mean signals from the heavens cannot get through. Robert McKie reports In a few days, the world will shrink irrevocably. Engineers will switch on a flotilla of 66 communication satellites allowing telephone users – from Antarctica to the Atlantic, and from the […]

LANSANA FOFANA, Freetown | Friday 10.00pm. DOCUMENTS before the High Court in Sierra Leone show that the brutal civil war in that country was funded by Tripoli and that rebels in Sierra Leone, as well as in other West African countries, recieved military training in Libya. The documents came to light at the trial of […]

indifference Mark Atkinson in Washington When Asian currencies collapsed last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank came to the rescue with multi-billion-dollar bail- outs. Since 1985, when Tanzania began implementing its IMF structural adjustment programme, the local currency, the shilling, has devalued by 1 500%, yet the country will not qualify […]

FRANCOIS CASTERAN, Harare | Friday 7.30pm. HEAVY fighting between Angolan government forces and rebel Unita troops has been reported in northern Uije province, where Unita has surrounded the town of the same name. Uije was the last town taken by government forces before United Nations-sponsored peace accords were signed in Lusaka in November 1994 between […]