Special Mail &Guardian supplement on Internet connectivity in Africa Developing Africa’s information economy is of paramount importance, writes David Shapshak The Internet will finally take off in Africa in 1998. But taking the information age into the continent, which dramatically lacks the infrastructure needed for conveying the Internet and normal telecommunications, may prove to be […]
John SeilerSOUTH AFRICA, LIMITS TO CHANGE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TRANSITION by Hein Marais (Zed/UCT Press, R150) Hein Marais is not the first observer of post-apartheid South Africa to point to the burgeoning African professional and entrepreneurial classes and their conspicuous consumption patterns. The recent book Comrades in Business captures this dynamic pithily in its […]
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 […]
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 […]
Charlene Smith Outside a Johannesburg court, a policeman and private investigators compare notes before testifying at a trial of a major criminal syndicate. The policeman’s original notes came from the private investigators, who in turn were contracted by major medical aid firms to investigate millions of rands worth of fraud. As soon as they came […]
The Wild Coast SDI is setting local communities against each other, report Thembela Kepe, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ben Cousins Simmering beneath the surface of the Wild Coast Spatial Development Initiative (SDI), announced with great fanfare last month, are conflicts and tensions that could blow the much- vaunted investment initiative sky high. In some areas a […]
Mungo Soggot Professor Andr Thomashausen has accused the probe into Mathole Motshekga of violating the Constitution by banning the Gauteng premier from seeing him. He has also challenged the African National Congress to release tapes of his interview with the commission of inquiry into Motshekga. The commission recommended that Motshekga sever all ties with Thomashausen, […]
Alex Sudheim was pleasantly surprised by musical developments at this year’s Splashy Fen festival For the first time in the nine- year history of the music festival, Splashy Fen rocked. Resolutely folk-oriented until now, the event took on a radically enhanced contemporary element this year with the inclusion of bands that would have previously been […]
house World-renowned palaeo-anthropologist Professor Phillip Tobias discusses why it would be disastrous to build a casino near Sterkfontein Valley Since the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (Unesco) general conference adopted a convention on the protection of the world’s cultural and natural heritage on November 16 1972, 506 properties worldwide have been inscribed on […]