RUGBY: Barney Spender=20 AFTER a noisy, boisterous Saturday night to celebrate a=20 Welsh victory over Japan, the Hard Rock Cafe in=20 Bloemfontein was a ghost pub on Sunday at lunchtime.=20 Michelle, a bubbly waitress, who had seen the tips over the=20 previous 10 days rise quicker than a Kobus Wiese line-out=20 lift, cut a forlorn […]

The head of Avia Airlines has a shady past, reports Stefaans BrUmmer GERT de Klerk, the former airline mechanic whose Avia Airlines has made him South Africa’s Richard Branson, built his empire flying clandestine military contracts to war-torn Angola in the 1980s. Avia this month became South Africa’s first independent carrier to ply the lucrative […]

International literary celebrities select their favourite reads of 1995 John Updike Shaken and enlightened by Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers (to be published in 1996 by Abacus), starring a computer that holds within its circuits a little girl as tear-wrenching as any orphan in Dickens. While winging my way to England, I kept myself calm […]

Welcome Msomi, creator of Umabatha, in The Mark Gevisser Profile The divine justice of it all. When Welcome Msomi took his “Zulu Macbeth” to New York in 1979, he found it boycotted by the African National Congress and its supporters, who claimed that because it was “ethnic” (Zulu costumes, Zulu language, Zulu dancing), it had […]

Pauline Corfe THIS weekend, two exhibits from Cape Town’s South African National Gallery — Ezakwantu: Beadwork from the Eastern Cape and Jane Alexander’s The Butcher Boys — left for Europe and the prospects of international acclaim. But SANG curator Emma Bedford said lack of funds could jeopardise the showing of the latter work at the […]

CLASSICAL CD OF THE YEAR: Andrew Clements GURRELIEDER was Schoenberg’s farewell to 19th- century romanticism, the “key to his development”, as he described it. It was begun in 1901 but was only performed 12 years later, by which time he had left the lush Wagnerian world that it celebrates far behind. The massive proportions of […]

Reg Rumney While the government is pressing on with attempts to get South Africa preferential trade access to the European Union (EU) in terms of the Lome Convention, business seems lukewarm. The Lome Convention gives products from underdeveloped countries access to European markets, and could boost sales in Europe of certain South African products, particularly […]

Julian Drew IT is early morning in Johannesburg’s trendy suburb of=20 Yeoville. I venture into the street and am greeted by=20 three blond Swedish girls. “Can you tell me the way to the=20 Pink House?” they ask in chorus. “Just follow the yellow brick road,” I am tempted to say.=20 But this is no fairy […]

Gaye Davis WARNING that local government transition was heading into “white waters”, Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert this week appealed to politicans engaged in demarcation dogfights to settle their differences, saying any delays in the process would lead to conflict. If transforming local government became bogged down in lengthy court actions, local elections would be […]

Age: Somewhere between angry young actor and “old fart” of South African political theatre. Claim to fame: Overcame parental prejudice that grown men should not appear in public and make fools of themselves to win a slew of acting awards including an American Tony for his Broadway performance in The Present occupation: Risking being labelled […]