Staff Reporter
No image available
/ 3 July 1998

It’s rope not dope,

say hemp farmers Ferial Haffajee Major South African companies, in conjunction with the government, are funding research into hemp production at the country’s first experimental cannabis farms. Among them are Mercedes Benz South Africa, PG Bison and Masonite Africa. The farms, around the country, are controlled by the Agricultural Research Council and supported by the […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

Out of Africa, East or South?

Brett Hilton-Barber `I’m an expert in dating early man,” said an American woman. She looked around the conference room where hundreds of scientists were mingling amid fake rocks and designer bushman paintings, and caught the eye of her palaeontologist husband. “That’s my early man,” she smiled. “You could say we’re still dating.” The couple were […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

Black women can jump, reluctantly

Angella Johnson: VIEW FROM A BROAD Me, jump out of a plane at 3 000m? You must be joking. No way! Not this side of life. I could not have emphasised the point more strongly when my editor suggested, with an evil grin, that I try skydiving for this column. I gave him one of […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

Learning to love stress

Elaine Showalter This year a television cartoon character named Stressed Eric has been appealing to the modern psyche as the new Everyman. Hamlet had melancholy, Jimmy Porter was an angry young man and Eric has stress. From the time he gets up in the morning till he collapses in bed at night, Eric is pressured, […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

Playtime with Mda

Chris Dunton LET US PLAY edited by Zakes Mda (Vivlia, R30) Let Us Play gathers together three plays – one by the editor, Zakes Mda, and one apiece by Walter Chakela and Hilton Swemmer. Three distinctive works for the theatre, by three dramatists associated with Johannesburg’s Windybrow Centre, the first two are especially designed for […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

Moving beyond words

Chris Roper On stage in Cape Town The play Sadako is described as “moving and uplifting” in all the press mentions, and you tend to forget what these clichs really mean until you see them expressed around you. When the lights go up at the end of the play, the man next to me is […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

A woman for women

Andrew Worsdale Marleen Gorris has become a soft feminist. Or at least, softer than before. Her first two movies A Question of Silence and Broken Mirrors were savage indictments of male- dominated society. Born in Holland in 1948, Gorris studied theatre and literature before her stunning film debut with A Question of Silence. It tells […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

Nervous Gerry’s second go

Neil Manthorp Cricket The stomach churns, the vision blurs periodically, the fear of a failure so instant, and finite, paralyses the instincts and movements that have been second nature for years. Very few men, at any senior level, have opened the batting without experiencing these emotions. Many have suffered worse. It is quite possible to […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

Riding roughshod

Shaun de Waal On tour On the new Tic Tic Bang! album, Low Riding, two of South Africa’s best young singer- songwriter-guitarists combine their talents to create what could well be the local album of the year. Matthew van der Want and Chris Letcher have meshed to make a multifaceted work full of surprises, an […]

No image available
/ 3 July 1998

The cross-pollinator

Scholar Apollon Davidson is a living link between Russia and South Africa, writes Shaun de Waal The histories of South Africa and Russia are curiously intertwined, going all the way back to Jan van Riebeeck. In his journal, the first official colonist expressed the desire for help from a Russian with experience in the exploitation […]