Derek Malcolm Not quite the movie of the week This year’s Venice festival kicked off with a new work by an old master. At least some would call Woody Allen that – rather more, as he keeps on saying, in Europe than in the United States. He was not in town for the premiere of […]
Chris Roper The Smirnoff International Fashion Awards proved one thing: the fashion world is almost always at least five years behind whatever is culturally and ideologically current. This was brought home to me forcibly when I took my seat and found myself impaled on a glass ashtray. They’re actually encouraging people to smoke in the […]
Antjie Krog’s book on the truth commission has been highly acclaimed. But, argues Claudia Braude, Krog is too creative with the truth Fact, fiction or falsehood? The question is everywhere in reading poet and journalist Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (Random House). It is the first book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), […]
Lizeka Mda The Department of Education in the Eastern Cape is in such a chaotic state that branches of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) have called for its scrapping and for the national Department of Education to run education there. And the Cape African Teachers Union recently called upon the Eastern Cape government […]
under the microscope Stories emerging at the truth commission this week of the apartheid government’s `chemical warfare’ sound farcical, but the results were sometimes deadly, writes David Beresford The difficulty was in deciding whether it was tragedy or farce that was being played out on the 10th floor of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s headquarters […]
Adam Mars-Jones THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS McNULTY by Sebastian Barry (Picador, R110) Sebastian Barry’s new novel is so full of magnetising beauty that it all but harasses a reader into submission. You can try to protest, to say, “I’m a reader and you’re a book, can we not keep this on a professional basis?”, but […]
Douglas Rushkoff: ONLINE No matter how much we might love to hate Bill Gates, we can’t help but have mixed feelings about the United States Justice Department and the two dozen or so states suing Microsoft for violating anti-trust laws. Fresh from their unsatisfying victory-with- no-spoils over the tobacco industry last season, US attorneys general […]
This is a conflict as strangely conducted as it is pointless in origin, writes David Hirst in Zalambesa Zalambesa is a natural pathway for armies. It lies on what, when Eritrea was still a province of Ethiopia, was a main highway between Addis Ababa and Asmara. Set in spectacular landscape of deep gorges, fantastic rock […]
Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon In Wachthuis mugs did Meyer Kahn A stately drivel-dome decree; Where George, the sacred fuzzman, ran By canons measureless to man Down to a Muf’madi. I think we’ve got ourselves a real treasure in Meyer Kahn, CEO of the South African Roundheads: Atmosphere for Crime Control Division. Not only is our […]
Inga Latham On stage in Cape Town In the Coffee Lounge in Cape Town, comedian Chris McEvoy is warming up with Sczhoid before the Grahamstown run of his one-man show, Bitter. After the three flights of stairs up to the Top Floor Theatre, McEvoy is lucky any of us still have breath with which to […]