Kenyan scientist Joyce Poole, an expert on elephant behaviour, comments on the recent kidnapping of baby elephants from Botswana As a scientist who has spent two decades studying the social behaviour and vocal communication of elephants, I have been asked to comment on the capture of 50 baby elephants in the Tuli Block, Botswana. It […]

Brenda Atkinson Multimedia The world of William Kentridge is one of considerable public profile, prolific artistic production, and enigmatic private symbolism. South Africa’s most acclaimed artist, his conceptual and aesthetic sensibilities have brought him growing critical kudos over the decades. But despite his international ubiquity, Kentridge remains something of a dark horse. Reserved in interviews […]

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 […]

cash Insurance companies are paying claims in vouchers rather than cash, writes Ferial Haffajee The trauma of being mugged, having your car stolen or house broken into can be assuaged by the thought that if you’re fully insured, you should soon be getting a payout to replace your lost belongings. But when you lodge an […]

Suzy Bell On show in Durban There’s a mighty fine poetic clerk working in the corporation department in Durban, whose head is a-swim with splicing Strauss, Shakespeare, Mozart and Milton, together with baubles and beads collected from Las Vegas, Paris and Durban. He is performance artist Vernon Burns, who has designed eight highly operatic costumes […]

Angella Johnson VIEW FROM A BROAD `When I cool the base, rock this place,” chanted the female singer over the mega sound system. I watched entranced as gum-chewing young men wearing headphones and outsize clothes studiously fiddled with vinyl records on industrial-size players. The Foundation club in Rosebank was certainly rocking. Soon it would be […]

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, […]

Ann Eveleth and Khareen Pech South African troops could soon enter the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a 30 000-strong international peacekeeping force tasked to end the month-old conflict. The planned emergency force – mooted during a series of crisis talks in Durban this week – would draw together a combined total […]

Tim Radford Japanese and Irish researchers have begun to build a virtual guinea pig – a computer code version of a human who would be used to test the effects of powerful new drugs. The project is called Psudo, which stands for parallel simulation of drug release code. But it is likely to be dubbed […]