Judith Matloff South African company Mechem can now start clearing 7 000km of landmines in Angola under a lucrative United Nations contract — after negotiations cleared the way for equipment to be offloaded in Luanda harbour. Political or bureaucratic delays have cost Mechem, a subsidiary of state-owned weapons manufacturer Denel, thousands of rands weekly, if […]

Northern Province ‘witches’, banished from their communities, huddle together in a tiny village where they eke out a meagre and lonely existence, writes Fumane Diseko A dust road near Pietersburg leads to Helena, an arid and lonely village hidden behind thorn trees. Shacks made in a rush when people first settled have never been improved […]

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 […]

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 […]

It was a joyous occasion in Soweto when the English cricketers played there, but some of them were not happy with their form Cricket: Jon Swift THERE is an assurance from all concerned that Soweto’s Elkah Oval is to become an integral part of our cricket, a fixed seasonal venue and the future site for […]

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 […]

Ernest Thusini used to be a religious leader. But it was the brutal murder of five of his children at KwaMakhutha on January 21 1987 that brought him into politics. “I think the attack motivated me to go into politics because I believed I had to do something to help enable these changes to take […]

Cape Town Spurs are in line for an historic league and cup double, but the African Champions Cup finalists are one of the teams they have to get past Soccer: Lungile Madywabe CAUTIOUS, is how Cape Town Spurs coach Mich d’Avray still sounds after his team’s Bob Save Super Bowl semi- final win over Soweto […]

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 […]