Stephen Gray’s new poetry collection, his first in six years, has just come out. He spoke to Chris Dunton Your last collection, Season of Violence, appeared in 1992. Between that and the new volume, Gabriel’s Exhibition [Mayibuye], there’s quite a gap. Was there a break in your writing of poetry? To me Season of Violence […]
The squatter invasion that swept Cape Town housing officials into the high court this week comes against a backdrop of delayed, scrapped or crippled low-cost housing projects around the city. Latest council figures show that nearly R30-million of the R46,2-million the city council had earmarked for priority housing projects for the year to June 1998 […]
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 Capostagno Rugby The Super 12 is heading inexorably towards a conclusion and, while the whole country may be looking for scapegoats to explain the dismal efforts of South Africa’s regional selections, the whole country doesn’t have to find a solution. Nick Mallett does. But given the weight upon his coat-hanger shoulders, the big man […]
Tony Mechin As the leaders of the Zimbabwean Internet industry entered the Harare International conference centre in January for the opening of Internet@frica98, the country’s first Internet show, looming in their minds was the thought that the show billed as the “biggest Internet, intranet, cyber conference and exhibition in Southern Africa” was going to be […]
They’re a dance band who don’t dance, recording stars who rarely record. Yet their sound is everywhere, writes Lindsay Baker What with one thing and another, Massive Attack have taken their time. Their three albums to date have taken as long to appear as The Beatles’ entire recording career. But, gradually and quietly, their sound […]
Simon Caulkin reports on the bright young masters of the Web universe This year $20-billion of business will be done on the Internet. That’s about the size of the economy of Vietnam or Iraq, and three times the figure for economic commerce, or e-commerce, last year. By 2000 the total may be five or even […]
Penny Siopis’s new show enacts a dialogue between beauty and cruelty, between private and public, writes Tracy Murinik Quietly, to Chopin, two breasts bathed in blood-red paint dip and resurface as if by lunar pull. Beautiful, and slightly comical, this video seems to engage in ambivalent dialogue with Queen Cakes, a pair of “cup-cake” breasts […]
Angella Johnson Traditional healers have accused the pharmaceutical industry of trying to muscle in on their lucrative natural herbal market after a company was ordered to stop producing products to be sold over the counter. Pharmacare, a division of South African Druggists, was told by the Medicines Control Council (MCC) to stop making four cure-all […]
Angella Johnson There is much less of Louis Luyt these days – 18kg to be precise. The beleaguered rugby boss was in defiant, if slightly subdued mood, as he confessed to a room of Johannesburg businessmen that the pressures facing him had led to rapid weight loss. Just hours before he was expected to face […]