Stewart Dalby Spending it The tantrums and antics of some modern chess masters are nothing new, it would seem. Histories of the game tell a story, possibly apocryphal, that the earliest recorded enthusiast in Britain was the Viking King Canute (1016 to 1035). It seems that Canute quarrelled one day when playing Earl Ulf, who […]

The taxpayer footed the bill for the 177 IFP participants in the Shell House inquest, writes Mungo Soggot The Legal Aid Board paid almost R10- million for the Inkatha Freedom Party’s legal representation at the Shell House inquest last year – as much as the board’s annual allowance to university legal aid clinics. The IFP […]

European ballet and African dance forms are connecting, writes Phillip Kakaza The sun was too bright for a winter afternoon – not for me, a son of Africa, but for the Birmingham Royal Ballet dancers currently on tour in South Africa. And the English dancers’ interaction with 20 young South African dancers in a match-box […]

Five lucky Friday readers can each win a set of five volumes in the recently relaunched Oxford World’s Classics series -Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. All […]

Andrew Muchineripi World Cup Seventy years after Frenchman Jules Rimet “sold” the idea of a quadrennial football championship to a surprisingly sceptical world, the country of his birth has reached the final for the first time. Semi-finalists in 1958, 1982 and 1986, Les Bleus finally realised the dream by coming from behind this week to […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby If God had meant man to live in England, he’d have given him gills. That line kept recurring in my thoughts during two trips to the Cape last week. On Saturday Clive Woodward’s prayers were answered as the heavens opened and soft, suppressing rain fell on his England team at Newlands. On […]

Stuart Hess Minister of Justice Dullah Omar has asked for a report into Western Cape Attorney General, Frank Khan’s decision not to prosecute a former police superintendent accused of sexually harassing a colleague for six years. Khan twice declined to prosecute Mario Laubscher, on the grounds that he was suffering from depression. Carol van der […]

Jacques Magliolo If you’re in the enviable position to have enough money to invest in unit trusts, chances are you’ve been encouraged to invest part of your portfolio in bonds. But bonds appear to be complicated, jargon-laden creatures with names like the “benchmark” R150. Actually, they are simply loans. For instance, if the South African […]

Diane Coetzer For weeks, I tried to prise a CV out of YFM station manager Randall Abrahams. When I met with him at the station’s funkily appointed offices in Gauteng’s Bez Valley, we never really got to the details of Abrahams’s radio career so far, beyond discussing his early days on the University of Cape […]

Jeremy Cronin These are the South African Communist Party’s concerns about the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear): l In the first place, and consistently since June 1996 (when Gear was first unveiled), the SACP has been critical of the process that led up to Gear. In contrast to the reconstruction and development programme, […]