Living in Grahamstown’s Jazz Hotel is just like having a few=20 hundred people over for drinks, writes ALAN BOWEN I PICKED up a newspaper this morning to find that there is=20 indeed a world beyond the festival. However, it looked so bleak=20 and uninviting that I decided to re-enter the cocoon of jazz from=20 which […]

CHILDREN’S THEATRE: Di Mannie A VISIT to the Johannesburg Youth Theatre is fast becoming=20 synonymous with holiday entertainment, each production having=20 its own blend of humour and surprise. For The Emperor’s=20 Nightingale, the main room (or theatre) in this romantic old=20 house has been “turned sideways”, using the length of the room=20 to present the […]

With most of the stayaway Springboks back in the Transvaal team=20 and the Blue Bulls up and running, the Currie Cup is really=20 starting this weekend RUGBY: Jon Swift IN THE wake of the tidal wave of World Cup enthusiasm and=20 having navigated the trough of a player revolt, South African=20 rugby can truly be […]

Mick Cleary on the unique appeal of Wimbledon,=20 the tournament which is=20 an enduring love affair=20 WHAT image do you take away from Wimbledon — a bucket of=20 sweat or a bowl of strawberries? As serve after serve crashed into=20 the parched turf over the opening nine days, reducing play to a=20 sequence of one-hit […]

Some commentators see the current crisis in the National Party as a sign that it is on its last legs, reports Gaye Davis SCENTING blood, the pundits have been quick as piranhas in pouncing on the National Party. As it thrashes about in new, uncharted political waters, analysts have set to dissecting it, stripping it […]

Justin Pearce in Grahamstown National Festival of the Arts: With more events on offer than=20 anyone could hope to attend, the Grahamstown festival becomes=20 whatever its thousands of visitors want it to be CULTURE is still a weapon of struggle. At least, the Wimpy=20 workers seemed to think so when they drew attention to their=20 […]

Marion Edmunds DEPUTY PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki is considering a plan to grant so-called ” professionals” — doctors, prosecutors and accountants — better salaries and a measure of independence from the public service bargaining chamber. The plan was put on the table this week by the Medical Association of South Africa (Masa) in a bid to […]

How did South Africa’s most popular singer end up a sad, semi-destitute occupant of a seedy Hillbrow hotel? Hazel Friedman traces the decline and fall of Brenda Fassie DRUG abuse is not the sole cause of the decline and fall of Brenda Fassie. She suffers from a much deeper malaise: loneliness. It was drugs which, […]

CINEMA: Digby Ricci ‘THE pictures painted on the inner eyelids of infants … are not in=20 paste,” Edna St Vincent Millay memorably understates in her=20 poem Intense and Terrible, I Think, Must Be the Loneliness of=20 Infants, and the most impressive achievement of Peter Jackson’s=20 remarkable Heavenly Creatures is the union of frenzy,=20 sensuousness, picturebook […]

Stefaans Brummer FORMER police chief General Johan van der Merwe this week hit back at the Goldstone Commission for linking him to “criminal and despicable” police actions before the elections, charging Judge Goldstone with “the rape of the most basic principles of human rights”. Van der Merwe, who retired as police commissioner in March this […]