This was a good week for justice in South Africa. It saw the arrest of top former military leaders for their alleged role in one of the most brutal of the KwaZulu- Natal massacres of the last decade, and the demotion of that province’s safety and security MEC, Celani Mtetwa, accused of involvement in gun-running. […]

Justin Arenstein WHEN election authorities in Mpumalanga announced that they had lost the trucks transporting ballot papers to more than 50 polling stations in the former KwaNdebele, it sounded like one of the more amusing episodes of the local elections. But when the ballot papers had still not arrived 12 hours after polls were supposed […]

Mamphela Ramphele tells how Steve Biko’s death in detention coincided with a threat to her unborn baby, in the third extract from her autobiography IT is difficult to explain the series of coincidences which began to happen after my return to Lenyenye (a small Northern Transvaal village to which Ramphele had been banished), other than […]

The Third Force: Apartheid’s chickens come home to roost with the arrest of retired generals and a former defence minister Mail and Guardian reporters General Magnus Malan and 10 former colleagues were arrested because police seized top-secret documents linking them to an Inkatha hit-squad and the birth of the “Third Force”. KwaZulu-Natal’s cautious Attorney General […]

Neil Bierbaum An on-line radio news service is being provided by the South African Press Association under the banner of its new division Network Radio Services (NRS), which will also act as an advertising brokerage for community and commercial radio stations. The news product, dubbed Network Radio News, is presently being supplied in text form […]

Fine Art: Hazel Friedman I first saw the work of Sandile Zulu (now showing at the Market) during a 1992 exhibition held by Wits University’s Fine Arts Department where Zulu was a student. At the time his burnt offerings struck me as extraordinarily beautiful, but anachronistic in the context of all those post-modern pastiches produced […]

Ann Eveleth While most South Africans were preparing for last year’s elections, an ambitious group of right-wingers was plotting to sieze control of KwaZulu-Natal, the Estcourt Regional Court heard this week. AWB member Freddie Steyn testified that he and five right-wingers on trial for illegal possession of weapons, explosives and poison had planned to seize […]

Collin Matjila, chairman of the executive committee of the Greater Johannesburg TMC, in The Mark Gevisser Profile Who? This is the man who, for the past year, has controlled a budget of R6-billion, bigger than that of four provinces and over half the size of Gauteng’s. This is the man who has had 35 000 […]

Philippa Garson looks into some possible scenarios for higher education in South Africa THOSE who encountered the 1990 Mont Fleur scenarios, symbolic representations of the country’s possible futures on the pinnacle of its transition, can probably remember the too-much-too-soon Icarus, the hamstrung lame duck, the head-in-the-sand ostrich and the soaring flamingos. With the exception of […]