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 […]

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 […]

General Sani Abacha is nothing if not blatant. Nigeria’s military ruler is not pussyfooting around like some other former-military- leaders-turned-civilian-presidents who organised elaborate elections with the trappings, if not the substance, of democracy. Abacha banned all political parties after seizing power in 1993. He subsequently legalised five new parties, all of which just happened to […]

Clare Longrigg Profile What defines Denzel Washington as an actor? Some say it’s his intense, brooding stillness, others that it’s his laser-beam focus. Or his way of drawing words out of a deep gravelly well within him. But most people will tell you it’s the vest. In the noir thriller Devil in a Blue Dress […]

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 […]

Swapna Prabhakaran If tigers could speak, they’d sound just like Tim Modise and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton. Their laidback voices resonate around the studio in a half-purr, half-growl hinting at claws and teeth, and the very sharp intelligence of jungle cats. Modise – an old familiar on SAfm – has teamed up with the BBC’s Quist-Arcton to […]

Mail & Guardian reporter With foreign donor funding drying up, South Africa’s non-governmental organisations and their donors this week formed an agency to devise creative means to make them financially sustainable. The South African NGO Coalition (Sangoco), the South African Grantmakers Association (Saga) and the United Kingdom’s Charities Aid Foundation joined hands to set up […]

Once a vibrant part of the Soweto arts scene, the Funda Centre has had to adapt. Swapna Prabhakaran finds out how It is a sad fact that Soweto’s Funda Centre is better known internationally than it is in Johannesburg. The once-famous centre for literacy and the arts has transformed in the Nineties to become a […]

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 […]