Rowan Callaghan Two-year-old Fartoun plays innocently in the doorway of the cavernous room at Angelo hostel just outside Boksburg, indifferent to the omnipresent stench which fouls the air. Her family fled civil war in Somalia, but they feel abandoned in South Africa. The little girl’s mother has left home for the day to see if […]

Sharon Hammond and Hazel Friedman Four years after a high concentration of arsenic was first found in drinking water at Anglovaal’s New Consort gold mine in Barberton, Mpumalanga, the poison is alleged to have claimed its first victim. An investigation into the mine started recently after 2 000 residents were poisoned by drinking water in […]

CRICKET: Jon Swift WE ARE two days into the scheduled five of the pivotal Test in the series against England. All the frustration of the rained-out opening confrontation at Centurion Park, matched only by the vexation of the South African bowlers, thwarted by Mike Atherton and Jack Russell in the interminably long fifth day at […]

The man accused of killing a trainee diplomat has been allowed to leave the country, writes David Beresford WEDDING bells were due to ring out for Roslyn Perkins this week. Instead she is nursing her grief in England and fuming at a demonstration of the apparent powerlessness of the powerful where the new South Africa […]

Mehlo Mvelase A VISIBLY angry King Goodwill Zwelithini for the first time blamed the Inkatha Freedom Party publicly for violence last weekend — after his brother, Prince Mbousi Zulu, had escaped a hail of bullets fired at his car. Zwelithini’s outburst, during a traditional ceremony in KwaZulu-Natal’s KwaNongoma last Saturday, marks a new low in […]

RUGBY: Jon Swift IT is to the credit of the new-style South African Rugby Football Union that the process of changing the top playing management has been a fairly smooth affair. And while there has been some chopping and changing, this has been without the blood-letting which has typified such changes both historically and in […]

Chris McGreal follows a forlorn dirt track to Oloibiri, where oil was first struck in the Niger Delta 40 years ago ASMALL, rectangular sign on the dirt track into Oloibiri is the sole monument to the crucible of modern Nigeria. “This is Oloibiri, the goose that lays the golden egg. You are welcome,” it says. […]

Cinema: Andrew Worsdale MACHISMO meets facetious jokiness in Robert Rodriguez’ Desperado, the disappointing follow-up to his zany and spirited $7 000 art- house hit, El Mariachi. Antonio (baby-fat) Banderas plays the balladeer who travels with a veritable armoury inside his guitar-case as he proceeds to exact revenge on a druglord in a small Mexican border […]

The Mail & Guardian, like other local newspapers, cannot consider itself to be exempt from public analysis, but it is the critical self-consciousness of the new South African state, writes Colin Paisley BRUCE COHEN certainly knows a lot about the problem of media control in this country. His article (Mail & Guardian, December 1 to […]

Contrary to government rationalisations, privatisation is not necessarily in the interests of disadvantaged South Africans, argues Brendan Martin THE price of water was as popular a talking point in the Gdansk birthplace of Polish Solidarity this week as the defeat of the city’s favourite son, Lech Walesa, in the presidential election. Water tariffs have risen […]