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 […]
Alex Sudheim : On show in Durban ‘I am a visual poet,” says Deryck Healey. Trite as it may superficially sound, once immersed in his art and his nature, one realises this brief epithet is really the only one that fits. There is a quality in Healey’s work, and in his approach to making it, […]
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 […]
Tom Quoin : Architecture We will soon have a home for our Constitutional Court. If construction proceeds as expected, it should be ready for occupation early in the year 2000. The building will stand on the upper reaches of the newly named Constitution Hill, north of the painfully memorable Fort, Johannesburg. It will overlook the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Stephen Gray : Unspoilt places ‘Prickly pear”, I suppose I knew, was the homely way to refer to that flat, jointed, paddle-leaved plant which holds its barrel- shaped fruit aloft like sore thumbs. If pushed, I could have volunteered its botanical label: Opuntia – a suitably blunt name for the gawky, invasive alien that should […]
Mark Gevisser COUNTRY OF MY SKULL by Antjie Krog (Random House, R90) ‘We boers,” wrote Rian Malan in Business Day recently, “are terminally fed up” with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has become “increasingly irksome to those of us who thought we attained a certain nobility in 1994 by surrendering power to a mistrusted […]