DEREK MALCOLM meets Emir Kusturica, the Bosnian director, whose film Underground opens in SA this week HE looks like a veteran rock star, tall and handsome if slightly dishevelled from too much touring. But Emir Kusturica, who hails from Sarajevo, is a film-maker without a rock star’s vanity. He speaks quietly and with conviction off […]
ART: Julia Teale THE paintings of Trevor Makhoba, Standard Bank Young Artist award-winner for 1996, display an unusual intensity of vision and execution. There is no doubt that Makhoba is an accomplished painter, with a sophisticated understanding of both the psychological and aesthetic potential of colour. In this regard, the paintings are often seductive, drawing […]
Everyone pitched in to make the Klein Karoo’s outreach project a success. But was it? BAFANA KHUMALO was there MIDDELPLAAS looks like the kind of place where the arrival of a train makes the front page of the local newspaper (if there is a local rag). Desolate, it lies in a valley 20km from Oudtshoorn. […]
Eddie Koch The Truth and Reconciliation Commission this week faced challenges on three fronts just as it was gearing up to hear applications for amnesty later this month from agents who committed human rights abuses in the apartheid era. Firstly, the families of four murdered activists announced they will launch a Constitutional Court application for […]
Ann Eveleth The air force flights of former defence minister Magnus Malan and his co-accused in the Durban Supreme Court murder trial are saving the state about R7 000 each weekend, according to a South African Airways (SAA) estimate. South African National Defence Force (SANDF) spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Margie Neethling confirmed the fuel and maintenance costs […]
Hazel Friedman Secret liaisons with the Soweto Committee of Ten. Dangerous midnight manoeuvres through townships to meet banned activist Albertina Sisulu during the height of South Africa’s State of Emergency. This is what it took to maintain one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle: a clandestine Israeli-ANC initiative — the Israeli and South […]
Stefaans Brummer BOTSWANA is rapidly expanding its defence force, bucking a trend of demilitarisation in Southern Africa and sparking fears that the region’s most peaceful country may be heading for instability. A controversial order of an estimated 50 tanks from the Netherlands this year follows closely on that of another 36 British tanks. Botswana, which […]
Ann Eveleth King Goodwill Zwelithini wants South African taxpayers to finance an extensive new royal bureaucracy to help him woo KwaZulu-Natal’s traditional leaders out of the political quagmire he led them into during decades of submission to Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi. A royal budget proposal handed to former Provincial and Constitutional Affairs Minister […]
This week the Mail & Guardian suffered the indignity of a conviction in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court on charges of crimen injuria for attempting to place under electronic surveillance a meeting attended by the former Civil Co-operation Bureau commander Staal Burger in 1992. The magistrate fined us R3 000 and the editor an additional R1 […]
The play: Much Ado About Nonsense Cast: Makgoba, Van Onselen, Davis, Pityana, et al Verdict: New cast, old script. A political farce in two instances Critic: Frederik van Zyl Slabbert It is necessary to put this two-act political farce into the proper perspective. It was performed at smaller, lesser-known venues (I know that universities and […]