Craig Bishop: National Festival of the Arts The astonishing art of two-tone singing is practised by just three cultures: Tibetans, Mongolians and by a small group of Xhosa-speakers in the Lady Frere district of the Eastern Cape. Lady Frere’s Ngqoko Choir practises a singing art so special that it has been recorded and studied by […]
Krisjan Lemmer The management at the Dorsbult Bar had to send out for fresh supplies of sickbags this week, what with all the heaving going on among patrons over the Robert McBride story. Our old friend “Suiker” Britz rushed to Maputo and announced it was his considere d and unbiased opinion that the young diplomat […]
Alex Duval Smith reports on the United States president’s visit to a continent reborn as a trading partner Bill Clinton’s six-nation tour of Africa next week – the first by a serving United States president for almost 20 years – will reward good book-balancers and strategic friends. But it will also lay bare mixed African […]
Lower interest rates and a consumer-friendly budget are sure to put extra money into the pockets of consumers – which should bring smiles to the country’s retailers and value to their shares. While some of the bigger South African stores have had a difficult time in the last year with low levels of consumer spending […]
Andy CapostagnoCricket If this is the beginning of a new age, then it’s particularly appropriate that South Africa will go into the Newlands Test against opponents who are, in the best sense of the word, old fashioned. Sri Lanka may be the world champions in one-day cricket, b ut their approach to Test cricket, if […]
Sylvia Brownrigg THE COLLECTED STORIES by Paul Theroux (Penguin, R54,95) Paul Theroux will go anywhere. He will willingly explore the blighted territory of a failing marriage; the tangled jungle of a mad poet’s secret anti-Semitism; the belated sexual guilt of a Hindu. In this great slab of his short fiction, Theroux is bolde r than […]
with the times People who got themselves classified coloured in the old days are switching back – to black, writes Angella Johnson Once upon a time in the old South Africa it was considered infinitely preferable to be coloured rather than black. At least that was what Frank Makoba’s family thought when they opted to […]
Brett Davidson Auckland Park’s education division is forging ahead on a number of fronts, laying the foundations for the future of public service broadcasting. It is forming innovative and complex relationships with the government and other stakeholders, promoting local production and lobbying against the increasing pressure towards commercialisation. “There are some educational programmes that can […]
I find myself sitting next to Mike Atherton as the England cricket team crowds on to a small plane leaving Guyana for the next Test in Barbados. He is reading the memoirs of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from Chile. Atherton is also impressively familiar with Guyanese literature and mentions the recent death of […]
Tracy Murinik: On show in Cape Town Like the variegations of a leaf skeleton, or a highly convoluted, contoured mapping of space, Paul Edmunds’s assemblages inveigle themselves along the foundations of the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet in an installation entitled Once Again. Hundreds of small plastic cable ties and bottle tops, all meticulously joined […]