leaders SACP Gauteng: RIGHT TO REPLY Sechaba ka’Nkosi’s article, “SACP split over who will lead” (June 19 to 25) uses the politburo meeting held on June 16 as a basis for so-called disunity. From our understanding of South African Communist Party procedures, nominations start at branch level, then go to districts and are finalised at […]
Jack Lundin: PERSONAL HISTORY Until a few weeks ago you could have seen him on the corner of Pretoria Street and Quartz: filthy dirty, stinking of glue, begging from cars. Twelve years old and one of the small army of Hillbrow street urchins. My notes on Elias start at 9.50 am on October 1 1996, […]
Swapna Prabhakaran A quiet and mostly unseen battle has been raging for months around KwaZulu-Natal’s waste dumps. Two waste dumps were officially closed down last year and another collapsed in a disaster that left the province with a hazardous waste-disposal crisis. The chaos began after floods and mudslides last September wreaked havoc with the province’s […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi Disillusionment with the African National Congress and hopes of pulling off surprises in next year’s general election made up the vision that guided the United Democratic Movement at its springboard first national congress at the weekend. It became evident that while the black leaders of the party would launch a battle to lure […]
Oxford University Press (OUP)has relaunched its paperback World’s Classics series, a handsome and sturdy set of the best of Europe’s voluminous literature (with some American and Asian works thrown in, too). The titles reach back to Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and forward to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The series features sacred texts such as the […]
Ed O’Loughlin The Pretoria grave of Anglo-Boer War soldier and poet Harry “Breaker” Morant has been taken under the care of the Australian government, 96 years after he was court-martialled and executed for alleged atrocities against Boer prisoners and civilians. The grave, which had suffered from neglect and vandalism, stands in a quiet civilian section […]
Province ANC Mukoni T Ratshitanga Northern Province Premier, Ngoako Ramathlodi, who breathed a sigh of relief when he regained his position as provincial chair of the African National Congress last weekend, faces a tough challenge of rooting out ethnic tensions. The province is made up of three former homelands – Lebowa, Venda and Gazankulu – […]
Electronic commerce is on the rise on the World Wide Web. But there are still a number of problems in this new market place, write Alex Brummer and Nicholas Bannister There comes a point with a technological process when the world wakes up to the possibilities of what can be achieved. A decade ago the […]
Mercedes Sayagues A SECOND LOOK The news of Alioune Blondin Beye’s death in a plane crash found me writing in my mind an angry letter to the Mail & Guardian, prompted by its latest stories on Angola. My anger was not about the stories nor directed to Beye (although nothing bad is said about the […]
in Carletonville Andr was in matric in a small Afrikaans mining town when he began taking the hormone tablets that would ultimately transform him into Tula – but only more than 20 years later. Charl Blignaut traces one woman’s story of emancipation ‘Every day of my life I threaten to leave Carletonville,” sighs Tula from […]