Robert Kirby : LOOSE CANNON I keep telling the editor of this paper that he needs to get much more with it, to shrug off the air of 1960s priggish decency that pervades the entire Mail & Guardian enterprise. Just because Jeff Zerbst worked in what were then The Weekly Mail offices shortly before he […]
Andy Duffy The government is mulling over an offer from one of the world’s leading Aids experts to set up a R40-million research unit in South Africa. Dr Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who first isolated the HIV virus in 1983, tabled his offer in a meeting in Cape Town last week with the Department […]
Has the time come for Namibia to honour the heroes of its past? James Ambrose Brown looks back at the bloody conquest of legendary Bondelswart rebel leader Abraham Morris whose lust for liberty took him to his grave Abraham Morris was the last of the fiercely independent Bondelswart fighting generals. With his handful of ragged, […]
An overlap between Robert McBride’s outlandish charge sheet and the discredited Meiring report suggests an intelligence set-up, write Mungo Soggot and Stefaans Brmmer Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Robert McBride conspired with Cuban and American diplomats to overthrow the ANC government: that is among the bizarre claims which have kept McBride in a Mozambique prison cell for […]
Anthony Egan LAST DAYS IN CLOUD CUCKOOLAND: DISPATCHES FROM WHITE AFRICA by Graham Boynton (Jonathan Ball, R99,95) This book is hard to categorise. Its title makes it sounds like journalism; parts of it read like an attempt to understand the democratic transition in South Africa. Much of it is reminscences of a childhood in what […]
Alexandra residents take the World Bank to task over plans to expand the Lesotho Highlands Water Project We are a group of low-income residents of Alexandra township, near Sandton. We have filed a formal protest at the World Bank Inspection Panel – the equivalent of its auditor general – against the expansion of the Lesotho […]
Nelson Mandela is promoting peace and development in Luanda … but neither are foregone conclusions Chris Gordon President Nelson Mandela’s visit to Angola this week takes place against a background of rumours of war and the poor health of President Jos Eduardo dos Santos. Mandela is scheduled to meet Dos Santos to discuss the two […]
Durban will once again host a number of international and South Africa poets, when the second Poetry Africa festival takes place at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, from May 4 to 9. Some 20 poets will present and read from their work and engage in discussion. Jamaican-born musician/poet Linton Kwesi Johnson is the opening-night headliner. Well […]
Janet Smith Since Ordinary People revolutionised the South African TV documentary in the early 1990s – and, indeed, the way the SABC’s current-affairs producers approached their subject after that – Mail & Guardian Television has set a standard for all other independent film-makers to follow. Its most innovative work to date, the award-winning Ghetto Diaries, […]
John Pilger cannot be accused of understating his case, either in his film or this article. Which is fine, but then he musn’t expect others to endorse his polemical views and interpretations. Hence the disclaimer. He says the old SABC sometimes ran critical documentaries by foreign TV journalists and accompanied them with disclaimers like the […]