Fiona Macleod A deal being hammered out with the southern Kalahari Bushmen will entitle them to jointly own and manage more than 1 000km2 of the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in the Northern Cape. It will also add about 500km2 on to the park. If the deal goes through – and there are indications it […]

David Shapshak Spending It In science fiction, functional technology has long been integrated into mainstream culture as fashion. Technology has often been reinvented as fashion, witness what Bang & Olafsson have done for the dour hi-fi or Apple’s iMac for the home personal computer. The cellphone, that once distinctive sign of a yuppie, is going […]

Fine Art: Tracey Murinik Willie Bester, Louis Jansen van Vuuren and Zwelethu Mthethwa form a rather unexpected and somewhat unlikely trio at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town this month. They have come together not only to exhibit their own respective works but also to collaborate on a number of pieces which […]

Tangeni Amupadhi A band of robbers and kill-ers is terrorising African immigrants in Johannesburg in what appears to be a systematic elimination of the foreign nationals. The latest casualty was Djo Ongonga Okamba from Brazzaville, the capital of Congo. He was shot dead last week, days before he was to leave for his home town. […]

Maureen Barnes Down the tube Without wishing to rub salt into e.tv’s wounds, I noticed that all the recent press schedules for the troubled service show a daily half hour news bulletin at 7pm which hasn’t yet materialised. In its place was a British sitcom, the name of which I don’t know, followed by a […]

dream in tatters Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH There are few countries whose near- destruction, through civil war, has pained me as much as that of Guinea- Bissau. This country fired my imagination in the early 1970s, for although its population was less than a million, it became – together with its sister, the […]

David Shapshak A flamethrower system fitted to cars to ward off hijackers has attracted huge international attention. In the same week South Africa hit the headlines with the discovery of a 3,5- million-year-old skeleton, a local entrepreneur was attracting nearly as much attention for an entirely different reason. Charl Fourie’s flamethrower will launch a fireball […]

Preview of the week: Matthew Krouse Ennio Marchetto, the living cartoon strip, doesn’t need to press buttons in order to transform himself into the 50 famous characters in his show. Present-day computer animators may perform God-like acts in television studios that double up as laboratories for human cloning, but this Venetian mime achieves the impossible […]

Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL What’s in a word? Probably not a great deal more than the user puts into it. The idea of rigid definitions is discredited, and the way in which a word is commonly used is little more than a rough guide to its meaning. So it is often not easy to […]

For organised crime in Asian betting scams, read artistocratic mega-punters in English sport 250 years ago. Gambling scandals are nothing new – especially in cricket, write Kevin Mitchell and Luke Tansey Any suspicion that there is a mole in the England cricket team leaking confidential information of varying quality and relevance to an illegal bookmaker […]