CDS OF THE WEEK: What’s new on the shelves at your local music store: Alanis Morissette on Prozac, the Hanson brothers all grown-up, Dead Prez resurrected, and more …
"To acknowledge the impersonal is by no means to devalue life or to slide into a hopelessly depressive state. Quite the opposite." Poet Colleen Higgs explores life in her collection <i>Halfborn Woman</i>. Paul Wessels tries to make sense of it all.
"The city boasts new shopping centres, new restaurants and new university buildings, but poverty is still one of the overriding impressions of this settler town, where everyone and their grandmother is a car guard." Mike van Graan reflects on the context of the National Arts Festival.
Professional hunters are capitalising on the Kruger National Park’s growing elephant population by selling "canned" elephant hunts to wealthy American clients. Police and conservation officials are investigating the "hunting" of a Kruger bull within hours of its delivery to a safari outfit in North West province.
February 26 2004. Johannesburg. The date and place where the seeds of the ongoing match-fixing scandal in South African football were sown. The event was a meeting of the Premier Soccer League (PSL) executive committee — made up of club chairmen and other club officials — at the PSL headquarters in Doornfontein. The meeting was called to discuss a spate of bad refereeing decisions.
Second-hand book dealers, old-age homes and a whole assortment of so-called ”secondary merchants” are all eagerly awaiting the forthcoming Government Publications Warehouse Sales. As each fulfilling decade of the South African rainbow democracy comes to an end, government storage houses will be kicking off the next 10 years with a major clean-out. I managed to get a look at some.
Many of us would feel a lot better if President Thabo Mbeki, the most credible and influential leader in the region, would phone Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and give him a firm and irrevocable deadline to move out of office. It would enable us to feel that the fundamental human rights values,for which we fought in the struggle against apartheid, are alive and well. The problem is that South African foreign policy does not work like that.
At this week’s annual gathering of leaders of the most troubled continent on the globe, a little change — better still, reduction — in conflict would have been welcome. But there they were again in Addis Ababa. The usual suspects. Sudan and DRC emerged at the top of the African Union’s list of hot spots.
Political office has never been for the faint-of-heart. Getting into office is often a dirty business, and staying there a trying one. There’s no denying, however, that legislators from developing countries — in the case of this article, Zimbabwe — face a particularly challenging set of circumstances.
"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday " — Alexander Pope (1688 to 1744). By happy synchronicity, the above quotation popped up on the Wordsmith website the very morning I was starting on this column. It couldn’t have been better suited to my subject.