Stefaans Brmmer Staff in the Gauteng premier’s office were to attend a compulsory workshop on Friday to discuss the prevention of leaks of government information. A copy of the “invitation” was leaked to the Mail & Guardian. The “confidentiality workshop” – addressed by National Intelligence Agency staff – was convened amid growing acrimony between Gauteng […]
Andrew Worsdale Movies of the week I don’t have any friends I still know from my schooldays. It’s probably just as well. Most of them weren’t really friends because I was such a wise-ass. But two films opening this week give unique insight into the world of children and growing up. Both are rites- of-passage […]
Greg Bowes Johannesburg nightlife Suddenly on Saturday nights in Johannesburg there’s a welcome and regular alternative to the usual mundane mega- raves – and one that’s showcasing local talent on the fringes of live music. And I’ll be damned, people are still dancing! The Stylus Lounge takes place every weekend at the stunning but seldom […]
Andrew Clements CDs of the week Naxos deserves an award. Using archive material supplied by the Canadian-based Immortal Performances of Recorded Music Society, they’ve secured the commercial release of operatic radio broadcasts, taken from live performances from 1937 to 1943, some of them hitherto only available as expensive bootlegs. Not everyone will like these: recording […]
Suzy Bell On stage in Durban Five years ago a young lad called John was living in London. He woke up one freezing winter’s morning and decided to come home and promised himself that if he was not touring his country as a stand-up comedian by the age of 25, he’d become a panel beater […]
`Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the inscription on the Statue of Liberty urges the world. In South Africa, which we pride as a “land of liberty”, we electrocute them, detain them, deport them and, on occasion, lynch them. Even when they are not poor and huddled we […]
Janet Smith Nine days of the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts will be turned on by television for the first time this year with the rah-rah arrival of Cue-TV on small screens throughout Grahamstown and surrounding areas. A late autumn lunch is a moment for Christo Doherty, senior lecturer in television at the […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Next time Spiwe Takura stands in front of police officers for her training session, she will have the perfect example of victimisation to present. A human rights trainer for the police in Gauteng, Takura claims her own human rights were shockingly abused in Yeoville. Her ordeal started at a supermarket last month when […]
Andy Duffy Special state investigations swallowed more than R40-million of taxpayers’ money in just 12 months, the government’s finance watchdog has found. The figures, buried in the report the auditor general released to Parliament earlier this week, point to a sudden acceleration, in the 12 months to March 1997, in the government’s drive to call […]
Dale T McKinley: CROSSFIRE What hole did Kuseni Dlamini (Crossfire, May 22 to 28) just climb out of to proclaim the death of the left? I’ll take a wild guess that it was the one he dug for himself in the depths of the corporate bowels of De Beers where, I have no doubt, the […]