Ferial Haffajee A South African multinational has patented the potent part of dagga and is selling it locally. Elevat – a brand owned by Pharmacare – is being hailed as a wonder drug for its treatment of the symptoms of cancer, Aids, multiple sclerosis and other diseases. This exposes the contradictions in South Africa’s policy […]
Chris Gordon The United Nations has appointed a new special representative to head Angola’s peace mission. Issa Diallo is to take up his post at the end of August, as the UN faces spreading conflict in central Africa. Diallo’s appointment, announced at a joint commission meeting last Friday, follows the death of his predecessor, Maitre […]
Liese van der Watt On show in Johannesburg Barricaded Bryanston seems a fitting backdrop for the first South African exhibition of expatriate Philip Badenhorst, who has been living, working and teaching in Antwerp for the last 21 years. His is an unfamiliar aesthetic – European perhaps – in its detached refusal to engage the exterior […]
The Mail & Guardian has taken something of a battering at the hands of the legal system over the past couple of weeks. After winding ourselves up for the libel case with the KwaZulu-Natal Attorney General, Tim McNally, we were advised by senior counsel to “tender” for a settlement of R50 000, which McNally took. […]
A war is brewing over alleged favouritism in the SABC’s commissioning procedures, writes Ferial Haffajee Independent television producers believe that the SABC secretly gave a multi-million-rand contract for breakfast television to a favoured firm while pretending to be taking submissions from its rivals. Questions are being asked about the role played in the deal by […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Pretoria It is really only while I am hurtling along the highway back to Johannesburg from the Pretoria State Theatre that the full effect of Reza de Wet’s latest work, Yelena, begins to sink in. A leading South African playwright based in Grahamstown, De Wet has chosen to continue her […]
What happens when a French philosopher decides to take on the truth commission? To find out, Chris Roper attended Jacques Derrida’s lecture on forgiveness at the University of the Western Cape `Pardon,” says the stylishly clad and devastatingly sexy Jacques Derrida. It is the first word of his lecture – one that will go on […]
Keith Henderson THERE’S A HAIR IN MY DIRT! – A WORM’S STORY by Gary Larson (Little, Brown) Unfortunately, the world has been a saner place since Gary Larson decided to leave the world of The Far Side behind him and, although there is a good collection of re-runs to glean inspiration from, the gaping chasm […]
Freud’s deathbed fantasies have been brought to life in a collaboration of sculpture, performance and sound, writes Brenda Atkinson Sigmund Freud has become a much- derided father-figure in the Nineties, a paternal icon who has been killed many times over by both his sons and daughters. Post-modernism and feminism have declared the founder of psychoanalysis […]
Stuart Hess Three employees of the Independent Development Trust (IDT) brokered more than R200 000 worth of business deals for their own company while in the employ of the organisation. This emerged in a Cape High Court application by Bonile Jack, Agnes Nyamande-Pitso and Baby Mogane- Ramahotswa, who are suing the IDT for more than […]