Margot Pienaar The Wild Coast spatial development initiative (SDI) is about more than just employment creation. It is also about creating the opportunity for local communities to become partners and co-owners of viable, multi-million-rand income-producing projects. Objectively, the Wild Coast SDI implies a reversal for the subsistence farmers and migrant labourers who take their labour […]

Tim Radford in London Suddenly the moon has become precious real estate: a kind of off-planet investment. Twenty-five years since two astronauts from Apollo 17 dusted their hands off and climbed back into a lunar module, Nasa scientists had peered at data from an orbiting spacecraft and found water at the lunar poles. Now a […]

Lizeka Mda: CITY LIMITS Six o’clock in the evening and there is no parking space left in the Old Edwardian Sports Club in Lower Houghton. Cars overflow outside the club’s gates on to Fourth Street, all the way to 11th Avenue. These are the premises of the Old Edwardian Society, prime real estate in this […]

Chris Opperman Former foreign affairs minister Pik Botha and several senior retired Armscor officials will be among the key witnesses in a sensational case due to resume in a Paris court later this year. It is expected to expose details about South Africa’s top-secret international weapons transactions during the days of the arms embargo. A […]

WHO ARE . . . JOEL NETSHITENZHE AND YACOOB ABBA OMAR? Ferial Haffajee It’s appropriate that the modest Joel Netshitenzhe is reading Primary Colours. The novel about an obscure southern governor and his election trail to the White House is a testament to spin doctors – the powerful back-room advisers whose job it is to […]

The battle for a free Namibia has been won, but the Herero people still suffer from a defeat at German hands in 1904, writes John Grobler In the small, dusty graveyard of Usakos, Adelheid Tjijorokisa-Ndjavera points to headstones marking the graves of her family. The impressive headstone of Karl-Heinrich Knaeble, born in Oberndorf, Bavaria, and […]

Jack Schofield ‘Think of us as a networking company,” says Intel’s executive vice- president, Frank Gill. Intel is already the world’s largest chip manufacturer: its Pentium processors have about 80% of the desktop computer market, and a growing share of the market for the servers used to run corporate applications. Now it wants to provide […]

The community of a mine was the environment for one of the SABC’s most memorable dramas ever, but it’s unlikely The Villagers will provide any reference point – bar its common setting – for the SABC3’s new homegrown, four-day weekly soap. The as-yet unnamed serial, which is pinned for the 6.30pm slot Mondays to Thursdays, […]

It wasn’t only the South African duo, Ian Woodall and Kathy O’Dowd, who came home to controversy after climbing Everest. Now the horror of the storms of May 1996 has been captured on the giant Imax screen, writes Ed Douglas Even though it fills only a fraction of the gigantic screen, the huge image of […]

Mandy Collins There’s something a little sordid about admitting you’ve used a pawnshop, isn’t there? Desperate people use pawnshops as a last resort. But Andy Schwenk, who owns Andy’s Swop Shop in Bellevue, Johannesburg, says there’s a common misconception that only a certain kind of person uses pawnshops. ”I’ve had Mercs, Jags and Rolls Royces […]