TRANSFER by Ingrid de Kok (Snailpress R42,50) One can only celebrate this triumph of delicate bleakness: One by one the small refusals add up to a life. Or this rich characterisation of complex love: Mouthing under water wetly jewelled words we are acrobatic aquanauts in a chest of swords. The first half of the book […]

Ferial Haffajee ‘Steady as he goes.” The seafarer’s motto has served Don Ncube well, and next month this captain of industry steers his ship into new seas. In June he will list Real Africa Durolink, an investment bank of which he owns 37%. These banks are all the rage in this age of mergers, acquisitions […]

FRIDAY, 6.30PM: A MARKINOR poll released on Friday has revealed that the Democratic Party, Inkatha Freedom Party and United Democratic Movement stand neck-and-neck behind a declining National Party in their current levels of support. The United Democratic Movement is the only party with the potential to usurp the National Party as official opposition to the […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby Ian McIntosh is one of the nicest men I know. He has one Achilles heel. Rugby. He is so passionate about rugby it makes him ill. At King’s Park in Durban he sits two boxes down from the commentators with his brains trust of Hugh Reece-Edwards and Craig Jamieson. Thus ensconced he […]

of relapse hard to detect Andy Duffy Staff at the Valkenberg forensic security unit are busy retracing their steps to see what, if anything, could have been done to prevent the killing of seven people by former state psychiatric patients. There are common threads. Each patient, despite their usually violent history, seemed to have responded […]

James Wood A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR by John Irving (Bloomsbury, R130) Realism gives John Irving a good name: he is lucky to hitch his wagon to it. Since The World According to Garp (1978), Irving has been praised for the “realism” of his novels – for their tossed plots, for the fat suffusions of […]

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 […]

Tangeni Amupadhi Police are three times more likely to commit crime than ordinary members of the public, and that’s official. In its forthcoming monthly report, the Human Rights Committee says statistics provided by Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi show the shocking extent of police involvement in criminal activities. Mufamadi told the National Assembly […]

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 […]

Frank Keating Cricket After their ultimately rootless and fidgety show in the West Indies, England’s batsmen this year could be forgiven a collective sigh of relief and a presumption that the home waters will be far less choppy. If so, they have another think coming. Allan Donald is pawing the earth at the end of […]