theatre Matthew Krouse In the heart of Hillbrow, on Saturday June 20, the creme of Johannesburg’s gay intelligensia sat alongside their ordinary city counterparts, anticipating the first performance of a long-awaited play, emanating from unexpected quarters. The Harrison Reef Hotel, where the performance was to take place, is legendary. Home to Johannesburg’s oldest gay bar, […]

Robert Kirby: Loose cannon I hope this isn’t too naive a question, but do we still have a minister of environment? I seem to recall that Pallo Jordan was in charge of that area. The last I heard of him was when he gallantly saved some rare butterflies from being wiped off the planet in […]

CHRISTIAN FIGENSCHOU, Johannesburg | Thursday 5.00PM. LATEST new vehicle sales figures released by the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers show that sales of new passenger cars slumped in August to the lowest level this year. The only good news came in the heavy commercial sector, where sales held their own in spite of declining business […]

John Grobler The first body bags arrived in Namibia from Kinshasa this week as a credibility gap as wide as the Congo started opening up around President Sam Nujoma. After days of obdurate denials, the Ministry of Defence confirmed this week that Namibian Defence Force (NDF) soldier Lazarus Hiskia had been killed in fighting on […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 5.00pm. DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo rebel leader Ernest Wamba dia Wamba on Friday said he is considering his movement’s participation in the all-party peace talks called on Thursday by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Wamba admitted, however, that the rebel movement has not yet received an invitation to the talks. Announcing […]

victory Evidence wa ka Ngobeni The spirit of the rainbow nation came to haunt black student organisations at Pretoria Technikon this week when the Freedom Front won the Student Representative Council (SRC) elections. A number of the FF’s 756 winning votes were cast by black students. The party has only been organising on the campus […]

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 […]

Adam Haupt spoke to Moses Molelekwa about the exotic ingredients on his new album, Spirits and Genes Moses Taiwa Molelekwa recently captivated Cape Town audiences at West End with the launch of his second album, Genes and Spirits. The show was broadcast live to P4 Radio’s ever- smooth constituency and the West End crowd itself […]

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 […]

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 […]