James Rupert in Kinshasa Three generations of Andre Miku’s family live in the concrete-block compound they have built over decades around a dirt yard and a mango tree. Of 11 people who live here, none has a formal job. Miku (70), a retired mechanic, receives a government pension of $7 a month. The family rents […]

David Shapshak Kabuki theatre, one of Japan’s most ancient and revered art forms, comes to South Africa for the first time this weekend. Renowned Kabuki actor Satojiro Wakayagi will perform the famed kagamijishi dance (the lion of new year’s banquet) at Sandton’s Theatre on the Square on Sunday night. Kabuki is quintessentially Japanese. A highly-stylised […]

David Hirst in Beirut President Liamine Zeroual’s decision to step down before the end of his five-year term looks likely to weaken Algeria’s military-based regime and further erode domestic and international confidence in its ability to end the gruesome civil war. The shock decision, announced last weekend, has plunged the country into new confusion and […]

It’s written in the stars, but only the experts can read it, and not everybody believes it. Jane Rosenthal visited astrologer Rod Suskin The day I made an appointment with Rod Suskin, I did not know that my father would die (I knew he was sick) and nor did I know that a devastating forest […]

Brenda Atkinson : On show in Johannesburg Looking at two Johannesburg exhibitions recently, it occurred to me that the position of the art critic – and of some artists – is increasingly one of impossibility. This is because one of the ironies of globalisation, transnationalism, and all those other terms that would suggest the dissolution […]

In New York you get whipped, in Thailand it’s real sex, but in Zimbabwe you just stock up on fantasies. Mercedes Sayagues meets the Warriors I don’t know what turns you on. But I know what turned on 500 Zimbabwean women last week: the muscular, sculpted bodies of six young South African hunks as they […]

Howard Barrell : Over a Barrel One of our stranger habits as South Africans is to imagine the rest of the world owes us a living. It is not a feeling many readily admit to. It is more an underlying conviction which governs much of our political and economic behaviour. We did once represent a […]

A lot more goes on after bedtime than we know about, writes Gill Moodie The next time you are tossing and turning in bed, it might ease the night to think of scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand who are holding vigil over electro-encephalogram (EEG) machines to try to understand that mysterious activity that […]

When Federico Andahazi wrote a novel about the clitoris, Argentines were scandalised – and women rushed to buy it for their husbands. Maya Jaggi reports Every discovery is arrogant, says Federico Andahazi, and possibly none more so than that charted in his remarkable novel The Anatomist. At its heart is a real Renaissance scientist from […]

Ferial Haffajee Emigration lawyer Hilliard Kassel is laughing all the way to the bank. He jokes that the only reason he stays in South Africa is because his skill in helping people to leave is in such demand. Based in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, the bespectacled lawyer is at the cutting edge of the migratory wave […]