Wally Mbhele interviews the Mail & Guardian’s newsmaker of the year, Robert McBride On a cold morning on April 9, South Africans woke up to what was to become one of the biggest thrillers of the year: the arrest of a senior government official in a foreign country. The official was none other than the […]

RUGBY Andy Capostagno It is always harder to stomach defeat when it is unexpected. It is like living on a diet of milk and honey and then being sent to bed with a spoonful of castor oil. But Christmas is a time for giving, so how appropriate that the Springboks should end their tour of […]

shepherds than the other Bethlehem’ Jon Ronson Gwylym Richards says that, in some ways, Bethlehem, Wales, is better than Bethlehem, the West Bank. “We’re a lovely place to pray and meditate,” he says. “The other Bethlehem is all about hustle and bustle, but we’re all about peace and quiet. Also, we’ve got more sheep and […]

At the age of 102, Sholipi Mbutu has outlived all but one of her children, writes Swapna Prabhakaran Not many people remember Sholipi Mbutu’s name. At 102, she’s been an old woman for so long, everyone calls her Gogo. Mbutu lives with her daughter in a tiny house 40km from the coastal town of Kwambonambi, […]

Belinda Beresford Assuming the near-mythical millennium bug doesn’t wipe out your bank account or erase all traces of you in your pension fund, handling money in the year 2000 will have moved on more than a little from the start of this century. Cheques, notes and even coins are going the way of the gold […]

Ferial Haffajee If Anna Stoffberg lives for another year, she will earn the rare distinction of seeing in the start of two centuries. “I am a hundred-and- something,” says the wizened woman from her bed in a tiny council flat in Eldorado Park, a former coloured township near Johannesburg. The flat is home to 10 […]

General Sani Abacha (54), brutal Nigerian strongman and kleptocrat who seized power in a military coup in 1993. Official cause of death was a heart attack. Chief Mashood Abiola (60), Nigerian businessman and winner of the annulled 1993 elections who was incarcerated by Abacha and died within days of the dictator when his release from […]

Finding a cure for Aids may take years, but the medical fraternity is attempting to stop the spread of the disease, writes Stuart Hess While the world looks forward to a future in which infertile couples can have children via genetic cloning, and people with missing limbs can be given fully functional robotic hands, arms […]

Best South African avant-jazz album:A tie between Zim Ngqawana, for Zimology – a burning free-blowing session -and Moses Molelekwa, for Genes and Spirits, where jazz pianistics meet the new era of drum’n’bass. And praise be to Sheer Sounds and MELT 2000, who recorded them. Best South African commercial jazz album:Paul Hanmer’s smoothly and confidently laid-back […]

censorship were over? Brenda Atkinson As the second Johannesburg Biennale limped into the early weeks of 1998, it seemed for a while that post- international-schmoozing stress disorder might have taken the tart out of art. Fatigued by working, networking, or just plain complaining, contemporary artists countrywide curled into introspection for the first half of the […]