Alan Henry : Formula One Last weekend Italy was on strike. For two hours on Sunday afternoon the entire nation was infected with an epidemic of scarlet fever, rendering them unable to move away from their television and radio sets. The focus of the nation’s devotion was Monza, a 5,76km loop of tarmac in the […]

Chiara Carter Bitterness lingering after the choice of Gerald Morkel over populist Peter Marais to replace Hernus Kriel as leader of the National Party and premier in the Western Cape is likely to resurface at the party’s regional conference next week. Marais is understood to have been pressured by grassroots supporters to contest the elections, […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 4.30pm. THE SOUTH African tourist industry could create up to 600000 new jobs by 2010 if it can successfully tap its travel and tourism potential, the South African Chamber of Commerce director-general Raymond Parsons said. Addressing the chamber’s Northern Province congress in Tzaneen, Parsons said that tourism and travel are […]

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 […]