Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg It seemed like it was never going to happen; the eagerly-awaited moment when Johannesburg’s performance underground would raise itself from latex-clad haunches and step into the mainstream clubland spotlight. The first public suspension in a Johannesburg nightclub; theatre for 2000. Two boys, 40 hooks, a metre off the ground […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Freetown | Friday 8.30PM. THE rebel leader who instigated Sierra Leone’s civil war in 1991 has been charged with treason in Freetown. Foday Sankoh, head of the Revolutionary United Front, was led into a Freetown courtroom under heavy guard on Friday. He made no plea, and his case has been adjourned to September […]

Arundhati Roy took the literary world by storm last year with her first novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker prize. In her first piece of writing since then, she expresses her horror at the nuclear arms race in her native India “The desert shook,” the government of India informed us (its […]

Keith Thomas ON HISTORY by Eric Hobsbawm (Abacus) Eric Hobsbawm turned 80 last year. He is probably the best-known living British historian, certainly the one whose work has been translated into the most languages. He brings to his historical writing some outstanding gifts: a probing intelligence, exceptional analytic power, great linguistic facility and an extremely […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Friday 7.00pm. THERE are still two South Africas and they should not be termed white and black, but rich and poor, Cuban President Fidel Castro told Parliament to thunderous applause on Friday. The one South Africa, Castro continued, receives 12 times the income of the other; in the one 100% […]

Nicholas Dawes Parties in Cape Town `Fuck dance, let’s art” is something like a family motto for the hip UK record label Ninja Tune, and it was unsurprising to find it on a flyer for Friday’s SEXsmorgasbord party at the similarly hip Take Four Bistro. This may seem an unlikely manifesto from the people responsible […]

Mail & Guardian reporter Employees who are fed up with the nonsensical vocabulary and endless meetings of the modern workplace have found a way to undermine both with a new pastime: Buzzword Bingo. Instead of numbers, bingo cards are filled with the platitudes of business speak – terms such as “add value”, “going forward”, “synergy”, […]

Richard Jago Tennis Martina Hingis made tennis history in a meteoric rise to the top of the women’s game. At the start of the year she led the rankings by 3E000 points and her position as number one seemed impregnable. Then in May she lost to Anna Kournikova in Berlin – and cracks began to […]

Moulded into the plastic soles of my father’s bedroom slippers were the words: “Man-made Materials.” As a child, I pondered that phrase for years. What, exactly, is a man-made material? Where did “man” get the stuff he “made” it from? And if he got it from somewhere and merely melted it down with something else, […]