Steve Busfield Games Consider the great board games. Think of Monopoly and you are a capitalist. Risk and you are a general. Cluedo and you play a detective. Now imagine a Monopoly board, where those fashionable London streets have been replaced by the illegal substances of the world. Instead of Old Kent Road you have […]

FRIDAY, 6.00PM: AFTER performing comparatively dismally for some weeks, for once gold shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange outpaced the ever record-setting financials. The market was pushed by renewed confidence in Asia and a record-setting day on Wall Street, as well as confidence in an imminent local interest rate cut. The all gold index hurtled […]

Benni McCarthy has scored seven goals in the Nations Cup so far, but so has Hossam Hassan of Egypt, whom Bafana Bafana meet in the final. Andrew Muchineripi reports The African Nations Cup final in Ouagadougou on Saturday will pit the flair and pace of defending champions South Africa against the cool, cunning assassins from […]

Luis Bernardo Honwana, a founder of modern Mozambican literature, now works in South Africa, representing Unesco. He spoke to Stephen Gray Mr Honwana, please describe your job. I was despatched to this country by Unesco [the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation]after the 1994 elections, as their director here, to negotiate the re-entry of […]

Coenraad Visser Classical music In its first season without SABC funding, the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) shows that the energy and sense of purpose which marked its last season were not the last desperate gasps of an orchestra on its death bed. The last three concerts of the newly independent orchestra confirm one’s impression of […]

Steve Morris Rugby In many ways, this Super 12 season marks the start of the examination of the relative strengths of New Zealand and South African rugby, a test that it has taken this country two full seasons in which we have not fully understood the questions being put to our players in the toughest […]

T he Natale Labia Museum in Muizenberg will be the venue for a further series of lectures on women’s writing by Shirley Kossick, professor emeritus of the University of South Africa and one of the Mail &Guardian’s leading book critics. The talks will take place at 10am on the first Saturday of every month, beginning […]

Janet Smith The fax and the trannie have, at last, been declared terminal, allowing designers, advertising agencies, publishers and print- media journalists to clear their desks of extraneous matter to make way for offices with more feng shui than filing cabinets. A colour-burst revolution is under way in this country, changing the way in which […]

Shaun de Waal CD of the week As far as I’m concerned, they should all be given to Bob Dylan, but the Grammy awards are interesting because of what they say about the American music establishment, and BMG’s 1998 Grammy Nominees shows off the pop category. The women get more than their affirmative- action half, […]

John Francis Lane More than two decades since his death, Pier Paolo Pasolini is still causing ructions in Italy. People are still fighting over his artistic and political legacy, but they are even more divided over the circumstances of his death. Was he killed by a rent-boy? Was he killed by a rent-boy in league […]