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 […]

smoke Mungo Soggot The National Intelligence Agency (NIA)destroyed key state documents as late as November 1996, complementing the wholesale destruction of state records undertaken by the previous government from 1990. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC)final report says in a section on South Africa’s gutted archive that the NIA destroyed records from the intelligence services […]

Johnny Masilela MY WARRIOR SON by Mary Anne Fitzgerald (Penguin) This is the story of the relationship between Mary Anne Fitzgerald – who grew up in the United States and South Africa – and Peter Kepaeka, a Masai lad, allegedly an orphan, whom she adopted. She was working as a foreign correspondent in Kenya at […]

South Africa supports the aims of Jubilee 2000, but it seems we don’t qualify for debt relief. Ann Eveleth reports Each year the South African government spends as much money paying interest on its R338-billion debt as it does on education, but the Department of Finance insists there is no easy way out. Jubilee 2000 […]

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s prison comrades have been freed. But they are still struggling to come to terms with the horror of ordeal, reports Alex Duval Smith Aa ke, Aa ke Pya Ogoni aa ke Iilee yira na ko Yoo-ue a zia-i Arise, arise, Ogoni people arise We shall no longer allow people to cheat us – […]

Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH She never allowed the leaders of the Soviet Union to forget what horrible creatures they were. And she plotted, with her “virtual boyfriend”, Ronald Reagan, to bring down the Soviets’ “evil empire”. To listen to her waxing lyrical about the “values of the free world” you would have thought […]

Many whiteys prefer Soweto to Sandton. Tangeni Amupadhi and Thokozani Mtshali talk to the township’s paler inhabitants Soweto’s majita (the guys) wave at Rudolf “Thokozani” Blignault as he travels the township selling coal for household use. Blignault is well known in large parts of the country’s biggest township, not only because he works there but […]

Shirley Kossick OKAVANGO GODS by Anthony Fleischer (David Philip) CHILDISH THINGS by Marita van der Vyver, translated by Madeleine van Biljon (Penguin) In Okavango Gods, Anthony Fleischer tells the story of Pula Barotse, a Hambukushu youth who straddles the divide between Western modernity and the ancient beliefs and myths of his own “people of the […]

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 […]

Jim McClellan meets a man who wants to sweep away the concept of the home computer Here’s a question to ponder: how many electric motors do you have in your house? Probably more than you realise. But you don’t think of them as electric motors. Instead, you just get on with using your food mixer […]