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 […]

Do anthems wear out their appeal and need replacing to suit new conditions? James Ambrose Brown examines South Africa’s three anthems that tell the tale of the century For the English it was God Save the Queen, and Land of Hope and Glory. For the Afrikaners it was Die Stem van Suid Afrika. For the […]

The ugly: Corruption Andrew Muchineripi South Africa scaled new heights this year by competing in the World Cup for the first time and achieving results that compared favourably with those of previous debutants in the football showpiece. A heavy loss to hosts and eventual winners France in the opening Group C game on a cold, […]

Julian Borger `If ‘im come here, ‘im see the world not so bad a place after all.” Sitting in the shade of an almond tree, waiting for morning Mass, the brothers and sisters of the Moravian Church had been discussing the possibility of a Second Coming when Sister Joyce offered this radically optimistic interpretation. She […]

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 […]

era Mail & Guardian reporters The past took on the future. Like a dying man who knows his time is nearly up, the 20th century picked this moment to have one last flourish – for old time’s sake. It had some scores to settle, some unfinished business to complete. Next year would be too late: […]

I have been a regular reader of your newspaper since it began and many are the pages from it which have been stapled to the walls of my multicultural classrooms. You consistently present alternative positions to generate debate and discussion. Over time, though, questions arise for which we don’t appear to be able to find […]

Much like a father at the birth of his first child, most politicians who reach the top flirt, at least briefly, with an image of their own immortality. And it is one of those irritating paradoxes of which religious people are so fond, that to live on beyond our own deaths a little, a large […]

dream of freedom Anthony Holiday If the year 2000 marks the border of humankind’s entry into a futuristic fantasy, then the year 1999 places us on the fringes of that reverie. It will be a year of a dream about a dream wherein we taste the first false fruits of the promised land of an […]

JG Ballard:The most interesting novel of the year was Alex Garland’s The Tesseract, a moody psychological tale set in the Philippines, and an intriguing follow-up to his bestselling The Beach. Could Garland be the new Graham Greene? He is now 28, Greene’s age when he wrote Stamboul Train. Will Garland head for the Hollywood Hills […]