STEVE GORDON, organiser of several music tours to South Africa, explains why the Cape Town jazz festival collapsed — and how to put together a successful event ANNOUNCED by Captour in 1994 as “the biggest- ever jazz festival in Africa”, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, which collapsed last week, had already tasted controversy a […]

Carlo Gibson’s art is interactive — so why, asks HAZEL FRIEDMAN, isn’t the viewer allowed to participate? ACCESSING Carlo Gibson’s realm means entering a land where the literal and the obtuse sometimes meet in a muddled embrace. His first solo show — at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery, at the Market in Newtown — promises […]

CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale LIKE a film by Quentin Tarantino, Get Shorty begins in a diner. And, like a Tarantino movie, it has lots of characters who go off on wild monologues about the weather and, specifically, about Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil: main guy John Travolta is an obsessive movie fan. In Get Shorty, Tarantino […]

Bafana Khumalo ‘JESUS! These people sure did give us grief.” I am at Museum Africa in Newtown, viewing an exhibition on the 1956 Treason Trial. “These people” are whites. The man who is invading this particularly private moment of mine is one of the workers at the museum. “Probably on a tea break” — I […]

Justin Pearce SOMEWHERE in the suburbs of Pretoria, religious prejudices have collided with a roadsign. Last year, the directorate of roads erected signs on the N1 Eastern Bypass indicating a recommended speed limit for night driving. The signs show a crescent moon and a star together with the recommended speed. Then suddenly, towards the end […]

Sipo Mzimela, the Minister of Correctional Services and IFP national deputy chairman, in The Mark Gevisser Profile IF KwaZulu-Natal premier Frank Mdlalose is the bluff country doctor of Zulu ethnicist politics, then the Reverend Sipo Mzimela is its fire- breathing priest. He looks like the archetypal avuncular Anglican cleric, right down to his ecumenical sideburns […]

The deadlock is broken: workers and employers will have equal representation on the pension fund board, reports Lynda Loxton The parliamentary joint standing committee on finance broke the deadlock on the question of worker representation on pension fund boards on Tuesday. It was finalising the Pension Funds Amendment Bill aimed at, among other things, implementing […]

Ricardo Dunn and Nicole Fritz report on the state of crime today Almost 90 percent of the 132 people who were murdered in one weekend in February were poor, young, black men. Many headlines in South Africa give the impression that whites are the primary target of violent crime in this country. That is not […]

Last week’s article by Louise Flanagan on Military Intelligence attempts to recruit future Minister of Defence Joe Modise in the early 1990s has provoked a furious row. Here, Deputy Defence Minister Ronnie Kasrils responds — as does the reporter HAVING distinguished itself as a bastion of the free press, and for many years under siege […]

Gaye Davis CONDOMS should be distributed to prisoners and those with HIV or Aids should no longer be segregated, a special work group investigating health care in South African jails has recommended. The Department of Correctional Services has always ruled out condoms for inmates on the grounds that this would encourage sodomy, which is illegal […]