Ferial Haffajee and Stuart Hess You can teach an old dog new tricks, as a legion of former apartheid spies, torturers and key dirty-tricks operatives are showing. Many are the frontmen of business’s push into Africa and are leaders in the private security industry, which is worth billions of rands. A former general, for example, […]

Venus, Goddess, Chocolate and Rasta Queen are the sizzling, street-smart, breed of girl band, set to shoot some pride into the sistahood, writes Adam Levin Half the Ghetto Luv crew still live with their folks. The other half live in a once- grand Art Deco building in Yeoville, in a flat without a door. Don’t […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Friday 10.00PM. THE Zimbabwean government on Friday gazetted sweeping new regulations to control rallies and marches, intended to increase the state’s control over political expression. In future, organisers will have to seek police permission in writing a week prior to events, specifying their purpose, and the business and details of proposed […]

Ed Vulliamy in Washington : Basketball After six Naitional Basketball Association (NBA) championships – the latest won in an epic final series against Utah Jazz last month – Americans are accustomed to gravity-defying acrobatics from the Chicago Bulls. But not of this kind. Last Thursday afternoon, the Bulls managed a contortion which beats almost any […]

Andrew Worsdale Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal’s major visionary film-maker, died last week after a long fight against throat cancer. Mambety was, without doubt, Africa’s most fanciful film-maker – the only man who treated African stories with the lateral cinematic vision they crave. Starting his movie-making in 1968 with Contras-City, dubbed the first African comedy, the […]

Movies and television make kids illiterate, say the experts. Don’t you believe it. Colin MacCabe on some amazing findings Television and reading are opposed, right? What parent has not thought that a few episodes less of Sesame Street or Hercules would turn their children into veritable bibliophiles, at home with Dickens as well as Tolkien, […]

Neil Manthorp in Chelmsford : Cricket The memory of the 1994 tour still sits in the palate of South African cricket like old garlic. The glory of Lord’s, the passion of the defensive draw at Headingley, and then the crumbling edifice at the end. Devon Malcolm’s crushing 9-57 at the Oval was only the beginning. […]

Mungo Soggot The state oil company has slashed the number of charges and dropped all fraud allegations against suspended chief oil trader Kobus van Zyl, who is due to be disciplined in the next few weeks. Van Zyl was publicly ousted in March 1997 by the Minister of Minerals and Energy, Penuell Maduna, triggering the […]

Andy Capostagno : Rugby There is a lot to be said for relaxation. In the next millennium we are told that working hours will shrink to about 30 a week so we’ll all have to get used to more time at home, more time on the golf course, more time. But rugby events on opposite […]

Chris Roper `They’re good enough to make it internationally”. Yeah, right. How many times have you heard that ill-fated mantra pronounced over local bands? And nothing ever happens, especially if you’re situated in that genre known disparagingly as whiteboy rock, but which includes a couple of women and the odd black person. The reasons for […]