Charl Blignaut The simmering feud between top South African d’gong band Skeem and the local division of record company Sony Music Entertainment this week threatened to ignite and in so doing spark an all-out war between Sony and PolyGram South Africa, with whom Skeem’s label Ghetto Ruff has a distribution deal. The battle takes place […]
Angella Johnson: VIEW FROM A BROAD What is a thirtysomething single girl to do when she needs an escort and all her eligible male friends are out of town? Well, you could always try the personal columns, teased a colleague. She may have been joking, but images of a sexy Richard Gere wiggling his tight […]
Sydney Mathibe South Africa’s witch doctors have learned the power of advertising. A cursory look at the classified sections of newspapers reveals a kaleidoscope of attention- grabbing advertisements aimed at the superstitious and the millions of dedicated muti-users. The ads urge readers to send money, and promote dubious potions, herbal and chemical mixtures and powders […]
Dave Hill World Cup He may do the least running, but the man in the number one jersey has as critical a job as any of his (active) colleagues. While South Africa’s troubles may have been solved by the inclusion of Hans Vonk, the debate about what makes a good goalkeeper rages on. The English […]
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 […]
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 […]
FRIDAY, 8.00PM: AN unqualified former secretary of the Mpumalanga legislature confessed last year that he stole more than R500,000 from the legislature’s Trust Bank account, the Ngobeni Commission heard on Friday. The matter was not reported to the police. Mpumalanga speaker Elias Ginindza testified that the former secretary, Alfred Mahlangu, officially confessed that he stole […]
THURSDAY, 4.00PM: ANGOLA’s Unita rebel movement has seized the small town of Piri on one of the main roads north-east of the capital, Luanda, raising the spectre of renewed civil war. The government reported on national radio that the Unita fighters took Piri on Tuesday, killing five people, following an initial assault on Sunday. The […]