deliver democracy Mahmood Mamdani A Second Look It is widely believed the root problem of the African state is the artificial nature of its boundaries. Were these boundaries not first arbitrarily drawn up at the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 and then imposed from the outside? This bit of conventional wisdom needs to be questioned for […]

Howard Barrell The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was ready to declare FW de Klerk “an accessory to gross human rights violations” before the former president brought an urgent court action to stop this conclusion being carried in the TRC’s final report, released in Pretoria on Thursday. The commission had provisionally concluded that De Klerk’s […]

The TRC has found that torture and executions occurred in ANC camps in exile. Some of those targeted were killed as a result of bad leadership, jealousies and paranoia, writes Charlene Smith Chris Hani was once sentenced to death by Umkhonto weSizwe’s (MK) high command in Tanzania for putting forward the grievances of MK cadres. […]

Oral poetry has always played an important role in South African culture, write Richard Bowker and Peter Makurube When President Nelson Mandela entered his birthday bash at Gallagher Estate in July, he was led in by the boy-poet Samkhelo Mcandi, waxing lyrical about Madiba’s greatness. All in impeccable Xhosa. He was following in the footsteps […]

Paul Farrely: SHARE WORLD The irony is delicious. The despair in markets the world over has just made Wall Street’s biggest optimist very, very rich indeed. Last week, Abby Joseph Cohen, cool- headed chief investment strategist at Goldman Sachs and the United States’s most influential market guru, finally claimed one of the biggest prizes on […]

staff survived With its staff drawn from such diverse backgrounds, there was as much tension within the TRC as at the public hearings, writes Gaye Davis The three-year life span of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been marked by public sensation throughout the hearings. But behind the public drama of tortured facing the […]

as a 23-year-old French man A 13-year-old boy goes missing in San Antonio, Texas. Three years later, he is found, alive, in Spain, with an appalling tale of kidnap and a paedophile ring. His family is overjoyed to have him home safe. But things are not quite as they seem. Nick Davies reports Just more […]

Stuart Hess A student at Peninsula Technikon, Max Hamata, has received death threats for writing a story on campus prostitution for the Mail & Guardian. Technikon management has also placed pressure on him to reveal his sources. After the article, “Sex for sale on campus”, appeared on September 18, Hamata was harassed and verbally abused […]

David Shapshak Debt relief topped the agenda at the Second Tokyo International Conference on African Development between October 19 and 21, when Japan announced a grant bail-out for some African countries. This was perhaps the most significant and concrete achievement of the conference, which adopted an ambitious “agenda for action” to halve the present levels […]

Review of the week Brenda Atkinson The worldly cynicism of student advertising work is wonderful for its predictability and passion, depressing for the inevitable brevity of its life-span. As such, this year’s AAA School of Advertising/Oxygen Award exhibition was a vaguely poignant affair that made me wonder just what happens to youthful irony when it […]