Sechaba ka’Nkosi The South African Communist Party politburo this week failed to reconcile its young radicals and its old guard on split nominations for the party’s highly contested leadership positions. On Tuesday, the politburo failed to come up with a single name for the party’s most contested position, that of the general secretary, between the […]

Lords Neil Manthorp Cricket Lords is a funny place. The funniest moment of South Africa’s last visit in 1994 involved, almost inevitably, Fanie de Villiers. The Afrikaans school teacher cum part-time amateur car mechanic had reached the pinnacle of the game when he arrived in England and began preparations to represent his country, in a […]

Ann Eveleth The apartheid-era homeland system and rural “betterment schemes” were the worst causes of land degradation, according to a rapid appraisal of land resources conducted in the run-up to World Desertification Day on Wednesday. The study forms part of South Africa’s National Action Programme to implement the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. The […]

The African National Congress will have to do better in the Eastern Cape if it wants to retain the support of one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, writes Lizeka Mda The African National Congress is fortunate the elections are still a year away because were they to be held tomorrow, it seems the United Democratic […]

A special correspondent in Abuja There were few tears and fewer obsequies for General Sani Abacha, the late and brutal president of Nigeria. Wrapped in a sheet and carried to his home town of Kano in the cargo hold of a Nigerian air force jet, he arrived too late even to be buried before evening […]

Most people who see Robin Williams loathe him. Sarah Gristwood asks if he’s really that bad The jokes aren’t that funny. On Albert Einstein: “There’s even a theory that his first wife came up with the theory of relativity. Which would make it the theory of relatives.” On film flying: “The harness shorts are like […]

John Owen Editors are biting fingernails and journalists are whispering in the corridors as the neck-on-neck magazine market prepares itself for the arrival of a kick- ass competitor in the form of Y, a new magazine written by young black people for young black people. The fire behind all the smoke has come into view […]

Marko Saravanja THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOUTH AFRICA: FROM MINERALS-ENERGY COMPLEX TO INDUSTRIALISATION by Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee (Witwatersrand University Press, R89,95) If you want to know the present you must understand the past. Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee (the director of the centre for economic policy for Southern Africa at the University of […]

The whole of East Asia and the global markets, of which the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is one small component, suffered the reverberations of this week’s seismic shock in Japan when the second-largest economy in the world sank into its first recession for nearly a quarter of a century. The situation was rescued by United States […]

Mungo Soggot and Tangeni Amupadhi They are one of the South African legal profession’s odder couples: Shafique Sarlie, a smart Indian attorney with neatly coiffed black hair, and advocate Manie Dempers, a former colonel in the South African Defence Force who could be mistaken for a security policeman with his balding head and piercing blue […]