Loet Douwes Dekker Celebrations in recent weeks commemorating the democratic elections and Workers’ Day highlighted South Africa’s work to ensure new constitutional rights take effect in practice. In the workplace, this means defining new priorities and guidelines, while taking cognisance of the implications of South Africa having rejoined the International Labour Organisation and the World […]
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 […]
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 […]
Krisjan Lemmer The man who gets this year’s Groot Marico public conscience award is Aboobaker Ismail. This week he went further than any other African National Congress official in owning up to responsibility for some of the horrors perpetrated by the “good guys” in the liberation struggle. Appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in […]
So what if the illusionist does trick us? Isn’t that what we want? Martyn Bedford says we must let magic keep its mystique So you’re on your way out of the concert hall, the music of one of the world’s great pianists still reverberating in your ears when someone sidles up alongside you like a […]
Chris Roper: On show in Cape Town The Association for Visual Arts, or AVA as it’s more popularly known, has got three distinct exhibition spaces on its premises in the trendy Church Street Mall. Their habit of showing three different exhibitions in the respective spaces means that the viewer is often forcibly made aware of […]
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 […]
The University of Pretoria’s celebrated Van Tilburg collection may have been stolen from Dutch Jews, writes Bart Luirink In 1951 Jacob van Tilburg, a Dutch art collector, managed to transfer 91 cases with valuable art pieces to South Africa – a remarkable effort for somebody who, three years earlier, had been sentenced for collaboration with […]
Women artists are taking control over their bodies and becoming overt exhibitionists. Joan Smith investigates Two women, two photographs. One shows a model in a dark tunic, her face turned blankly away from the camera, her raised hands holding apart the edges of a fur cape that frames the luminous V of her cleavage. In […]
David Bennun Foreign CD of the week `It is,” observed one visitor to my flat, “a bit bloody gloomy, isn’t it?” My visitor was referring to Massive Attack’s new CD, Mezzanine (Virgin), an album so dark that it seems to soak up the light in the room like a miniature black hole. It was playing […]