THEATRE: Peter Frost THE Truth Fairy’s in town. A sharper-than-ever Pieter-Dirk Uys, not content with the abolition of the apartheid system, is now targeting the forgetful South African public with its recent past, using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as gunpowder. The result is big, entertaining bangs. Truth Omissions (at the Baxter in Cape Town) […]

Gaye Davis A HUGE computer database, capable of cross-checking names, dates and incidents, will be the truth commission’s most powerful tool. It will allow for fast checks on the truth of victims’ claims. It will also ratchet up the pressure on perpetrators to come forward — and come clean. Building the database is central to […]

world The construction industry is positive about a better year ahead, locally and internationally, reports Karen Harverson Despite a slowdown in the building and construction industry towards the end of last year, the industry is optimistic that activity will pick up significantly by mid-1996. “The situation is a lot better now than two years ago,” […]

effect’ Madeleine Wackernagel reports on an unusual proposal to kick-start the RDP Two years after South Africa’s first democratic elections there is a sense of economic inertia. Part of the transition problem has been building a new government on old structures; conservatism is deeply entrenched, in business as well as government. Policy-makers are loath to […]

game Tactics in the one-day game are constantly being updated and coach Bob Woolmer is making sure the South Africans stay ahead of the game CRICKET: Mark Lamport-Stokes SOUTH AFRICA’S national coach Bob Woolmer has earned a deserved reputation for being an innovative cricketing thinker and strategist. nnnSince the former Kent and England all-rounder took […]

Beers’ hands Karen Harverson An upbeat De Beers — which this week announced a 14% increase in its attributable earnings to R2,25-billion for 1995 — is confident that 1996 will see its control of the rough diamond market strengthen. That control was threatened when Russia began leaking stones into the market in 1993, in violation […]

Unmarried fathers who want to raise their illegitimate children could have the right to do so, if draft legislation before the Cabinet is approved, reports Rehana Rossouw JOHN WILLIAMS (25), a printer from Mitchells Plain, is forced to sneak visits with his six-year-old daughter at her Sunday school class. The child’s mother cut off Williams’s […]

Sugarboy Malinga has always had the talent to make it to the top, but circumstances always contrived to prevent him meeting his destiny — until last weekend BOXING: Gavin Evans THERE are times in the self-contained little universe of prize fighting when the whole thing seems no better than a crass charade; and then there […]

Journalists rally in support of Fred M’membe and Bright Mwape, jailed for criticising the Zambian government. Justin Pearce reports Newspaper editors from South Africa and Namibia are to visit Zambian president Frederick Chiluba to demand the release of the two Zambian journalists who were arrested this week. The journalists face an indefinite prison term if […]

better Phillipa Garson ‘We are going to start with writing now; ons sal met potlode skryf” instructs teacher Diane Matthews to her “dual-medium” standard one class of about 50 pupils, two-thirds of whom are black. At Laerskool Venterspos, where Matthews has been teaching for 13 years, an unobtrusive revolution has taken place in the depressed […]