It’s been a bad week for municipalities in the Eastern Cape, with public figures battered by fraud and sex scandals. Peter Dickson reportsThe mayor grabbed his assault rifle while the town secretary downloaded porn from the Internet and seven councillors drove home courtesy of their fake driver’s licences. Sounds like a brave new world’s ultimate […]

Mark Rozzo THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE by Simon Winchester (Viking) In 1879, James Murray, an expert on the dialects of his native Scotland and the recently appointed editor of The New Dictionary on Historical Principles, called for volunteers from Britain, the United States and the colonies to help create the first complete dictionary of the […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Bujumbura | Friday 9.00pm. BURUNDI’S government, opposition and rebels on Thursday wrapped up a third round of talks aimed at ending six years of civil war with an agreement to meet again in January, but with few concrete decisions. The next round is set for January 18 to continue a peace process begun […]

David Shapshak in Tokyo So you live in an African country and you want to buy a good reconditioned second- hand car. With not much to find in the local yellow pages, nor much variety in the pricey domestic market, what do you do? Simple, you buy and import a foreign car. The success of […]

bark The silence surrounding last week’s appointments by the Judicial Services Commission is deafening. The Bench and academia are seething with indignation over the appointments of the two judges president and one deputy. Yet there is not a bleat of public protest other than the resignation of Judge Piet van der Walt from the Office […]

Maggie Davey Forty tons of apartheid government files are estimated to have been destroyed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) in 1993, according to Professor Charles Villa- Vicencio, director of research at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Villa-Vicencio was speaking at a workshop organised by Wits Graduate School last week on future access to […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni An independent mediator is to be appointed to intervene in the ongoing conflict at the troubled University of the Western Cape (UWC), amid fears that final examinations may not take place. Final examinations have already been postponed for two weeks, and the administration has not yet set a new date for […]

Maureen Barnes : Down the tube Last week, in what was the most riveting programme to date, Special Assignment dealt with the extraordinary affair of Vito Palazzolo, the man who seems to have enjoyed special consideration not only from the Nats, but from the present establishment. The team did a neat investigation of the background […]

A new film on Cape Town’s homeless people takes the viewer on ‘a moral obstacle race’. Lauren Shantal reports ‘My name is Yvonne and I drink wine. And I like to smoke dagga.” When the mic is wrested from the compere and the evening begins with an assertion like this, you know that decorum and […]

This could be one of those rare concerts that goes down in history like the Amnesty International Concert in Harare in 1988. So if you’ve got some wheels and you’re in need of a restorative African musical adventure, then put that cabbie into first and head for lush Mpumalanga. About 30 minutes past Nelspruit off […]