Peter Frost On stage in Cape Town Retro-shows. You’ve got to hate them. The Beatles, Stones, Rock’n’Roll, Abba. The peddling of a simpler, sweeter tune to an audience desiring the sanctity of an understandable past. Big business in South Africa for years now, and well-received by suburban audiences, if not critics who fail to see […]
Wally Mbhele Despite the succession of adventurous military operations he has been associated with, Aboobaker Ismail is an intensely private person – so private that he is still more commonly known by his nom de guerre, Rasheed. It was during his tenure as an Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) commander that he became one of the previous […]
Andy Duffy The National Party’s new Western Cape leader, Gerald Morkel, played a central role in propelling a convict’s outlandish sex claims against NP chief Marthinus van Schalkwyk into the public domain. Morkel, provincial police MEC and now premier elect, was party to the decision to put senior investigators on to the case. His office […]
David Beresford The master planner in the African National Congress’s liberation war came out from the shadows this week to defend his role in the most deadly phase of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Aboobaker Ismail, the ANC’s head of “special operations”, appeared before Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ask for amnesty for a […]
Philip French Movie of the week The cinema has done quite well by Oscar Wilde’s work. There have been versions of Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger; a plush Alexander Korda film of An Ideal Husband; a superbly cast The Importance of Being Ernest with Edith Evans’s definitive Lady Bracknell; Albert Lewin’s […]
Greg Bowes Dance music tour In what promises to be one of the dance events of the year, a veritable who’s who of commercial and underground dance musicians and DJs have been assembled for this year’s Camel Experience. The series of parties – this year subtitled, for reasons unknown, Quadropheria – begins in Cape Town […]
Chris Roper South African CD of the week The first words that the gravelly-voiced Arno Carstens croons on the opening track of The Springbok Nude Girls’ new CD, Omnisofa (Sony Music), are “we’re going to grow you up slowly”. It wouldn’t be too fanciful to imagine this as referring to the relationship between the band […]
Catherine Knox Teenagers as young as 13 and 14 were treated for drug overdoses at last weekend’s annual Splashy Fen music festival, near Underberg, in KwaZulu-Natal. Dr Grant Lindsay, who has been providing emergency services at the festival for the past seven years, said he treated seven to 10 people a night for overdoses or […]
Stefaans Brmmer Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga shares a business empire with an apartheid-era military intelligence agent who was also a key backer in Motshekga’s bitterly contested campaign last year for the provincial throne. Abel Rudman’s military intelligence cover was blown in 1991 when the then Weekly Mail revealed that an anti-African National Congress newspaper he […]
The new Afrikaans TV thriller Die Vierde Kabinet gives Gys de Villiers another leading role. Janet Smith discovers fame hasn’t necessarily meant fortune Two old Cessnas, a panel van and a Kombi make up the inventory of Logistic Inc, a company fictionalised into unsuspecting political life by Afrikaans TV thriller maestro Jan Scholtz in his […]