The Durban Designer Emporium’s first exhibition installation was a facelift for fashion and performance art, writes Suzy Bell `Durban’s sub-culture needs to be tickled, then scratched,” hissed the chick with a live goldfish swishing about her liquid handbag. The blood still hasn’t quite drained from the flush of it all, but the gouges, at least, […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby Not that last year’s Super 12 left South African teams with any reasons for complacency, but if anyone thought that the new regional system was a fast track to success they had better think again. Two- thirds of the way through the 1998 Super 12 and there are three South African teams […]
Brett Pyper The newmusic@rhodes series does not aim to present a Who’s Who of South African art music. Instead, it focuses on one specific vein within the work of composers from divergent traditions: music that somehow reflects the encounter of African and Western musical values in South Africa. This approach de-emphasises the substantial South African […]
The South African petroleum industry was thrown into confusion in March 1997 when Minister of Minerals and Energy Penuell Maduna threatened to “re-regulate the entire industry”. He accused multinationals operating in South Africa of maintaining a stranglehold on the domestic industry without contributing to black empowerment or the economy as a whole. Recently, black empowerment […]
The editor of Zimbabwe’s main daily newspaper, a nephew of President Robert Mugabe, collapsed in his office and died of a heart attack on Tuesday. Charles Chikerema (59) an avowed Stalinist who criticised white Zimbabweans through the state-controlled press, died after serving only nine weeks as the editor of the Herald newspaper. It was the […]
Andy Duffy A senior academic at the University of the Witwatersrand is poised to resign over his involvement in a publicly listed technology company. Professor Hanoch Neishlos, chair of the computer science department at Wits, and his wife own shares in the company that are currently worth more than R100-million. The company’s main product is […]
If the South African classical concert scene were truly Eurocentric, it would feature a lot more African music. That paradox is largely ignored in the confused debate around the future of our culture. While European concert halls currently offer hospitality to serialists, tonalists, aleatorists, minimalists, African composers and jazzmen all, the defenders of the classical […]
Charl Blignaut It’s something of an unusual relationship, but there you have it. Like it or not, the international actor, prince of protest theatre and executive director of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, John Kani, has throughout the past decade forged a very particular partnership with groundbreaking turn-of-the- century Swedish playwright August Strindberg. It all started in […]
The discovery of vast stretches of water between the stars has raised new questions about the origins of life on Earth, writes Tim Radford European scientists, using an ultra-cold orbiting telescope, have discovered unimaginable volumes of water in the space between the stars. The discovery raises new questions about life elsewhere in the universe -and […]
Lynda Gledhill Sitting in a luxury hotel dressed in brightly coloured clothes, Ester Mujawayo does not exude the air of a woman whose life has been destroyed. But this Tutsi from Rwanda is one of the few survivors in her family of the genocide that gripped her country in 1994. For a month, Mujawayo, her […]