Floundering or sinking, which ever way you view it the South African-Iranian oil deal is going nowhere for now, writes Karen Harverson Depending on whom you believe, South Africa’s deal to store and trade Iranian oil has fizzled out — or it has just been suspended pending the outcome of an environmental study on the […]

Elections provide the chill factor We should have more of these things. They seem to have a very high chill pill content. I’m talking of elections. We should schedule one or two of these as a matter of course. It has been pretty laid back, this election. Even the SAUK has, until the past few […]

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 […]

* Following Oom Krisjan’s observations about the Democratic Party being the party with not only guts but gore as well, the party came out with a new slogan: “Less gravy — more meat”. The manne in the bar, always keen for a braaivleis, are awaiting the next election campaign with interest. True colours * Talking […]

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 […]

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 […]