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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Emanuel Shaw II is too sick to appear in court but well enough to attend meetings. Mungo Soggot reports from Monrovia Emanuel Shaw II, the Liberian politician who insinuated himself into South Africa’s state oil industry, has tried to deceive the Johannesburg High Court by filing a fraudulent doctor’s note purportedly signed by Liberia’s minister […]

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 […]

Experimental choreographer Robyn Orlin previews the most magnetic work on offer at this year’s wildly varied [email protected] festival When the first scent of jasmine hits Johannesburg it’s the signal that Arts Alive, the festival that wakes the city from its winter slumber, is hotly imminent. This year is the Dance Factory’s sixth annual festival in […]

There’s much more to Swaziland than jackpots and birdies, as Alex Sudheim found at the Siyavuka festival last weekend It really was high time that Swaziland celebrated itself with a national arts festival. The country turns 30 this weekend, and over three centuries as a distinct and separate people preceded their formal recognition as an […]