The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda is often characterised as mindless ethnic bloodletting. Mahmood Mamdani provides a far more complex background to the conflict No two conflicting groups in the Great Lakes region have a longer and more comprehensive history of intermarriage than do the Hutu and the Tutsi. Intermarriage between the Hutu […]
Wally Mbhele Mounting frustration over the continued incarceration of Robert McBride, who has been languishing in a Mozambican jail without trial for almost two-and-a-half months, has prompted calls for the South African government to become more active in securing the freedom of its foreign affairs official. After the Mozambican authorities failed this week either to […]
Angella Johnson The first thing Hazel Kidson did on entering the Johannesburg courtroom where she is standing trial for murdering her husband was reapply her lipstick. Then the bejewelled 52-year-old sat clutching her miniature Bible. “I always carry it with me,” she later explained. After more than a year in jail, she was dressed to […]
The response this week from state health officials to our story that some of their former psychiatric patients have been killing people is instructive. Valkenberg hospital, which treated and released the patients, says such tragedies in other countries prompt, at the very least, a full-blown commission of inquiry. Not so here. The Western Cape provincial […]
Marion Edmunds gets to grips with how people felt 50 years ago when the National Party came to power The National Party today is a shadow of its former self, publicly regretting the policy of apartheid which brought it to power in the highly charged national elections of May 26 1948. Fifty years ago it […]
Fools, the film based on the short stories of Njabulo Ndebele and directed by Ramadan Suleman, opens on circuit this week, Andrew Worsdale spoke to the director Ramadan Suleman is a passionate guy. He uses his intense, piercing eyes when he talks and gesticulates powerfully. No wonder. He spent about 10 years in Paris and […]
Sarah Boseley and Tim Radford Cancer is one of the world’s biggest killers. It is a stealthy predator, corrupting the cells of a healthy body, doing damage and hastening death without displaying, for a long while, any outward sign. The treatment is unpleasant and the outcome uncertain. Nobody can be sure they will not fall […]
Stewart Dalby They are not the most expensive items in their field, nor are they the best crafted, but Rolexes are the most famous watches. Virtually every month one of the four big auction houses, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips or Bonham’s, holds a watch sale and there are specialised dealers. But Rolex will have an auction […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi National electricity supplier Eskom and local authorities are fighting an uphill battle against the booming illegal business of “alternative” electricity supply. It’s alternative, say its practitioners, because most residents whose power has been cut by town councils for non-payment prefer to use their services rather than paying the R650 reconnection fee. The practice […]
Bongani Siqoko The road to Alexandra clinic is lined with filthy industrial buildings. But the large, brightly painted clinic looks cared for and cheerful. Many visitors mistake it for a creche. Inside, however, it looks like any other state-funded health institution. Very long queues, busy nurses, crying children and wheelchairs fill the waiting room. The […]