Andrew Muchineripi World Cup Seventy years after Frenchman Jules Rimet “sold” the idea of a quadrennial football championship to a surprisingly sceptical world, the country of his birth has reached the final for the first time. Semi-finalists in 1958, 1982 and 1986, Les Bleus finally realised the dream by coming from behind this week to […]
Phillip Kakaza Live music Back in the 1980s South African music made a radical turn – the locally created home-brew kwaito took the music scene by storm. Its tsotsi taal- flavoured lyrics and irrestible dance rhythms are still heard blasting in clubs, shebeens and parties. Recently, much in a similar way, BMG (South Africa) is […]
Swapna Prabhakaran and Mungo Soggot Court papers have implicated top KwaZulu-Natal government officials in a fraudulent conspiracy involving a businessman who allegedly exposed high- level corruption in the province. The businessman, Sateesh Isseri, is now allegedly on the state witness- protection programme. He is suing KwaZulu-Natal Premier Ben Ngubane and the province’s head of expenditure […]
Jeremy Cronin These are the South African Communist Party’s concerns about the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear): l In the first place, and consistently since June 1996 (when Gear was first unveiled), the SACP has been critical of the process that led up to Gear. In contrast to the reconstruction and development programme, […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg `So, how was the play?” asks a friend over dinner. How was the play? How do you describe Closer? A couple of hours after seeing Sello Maake ka Ncube’s production of Patrick Marber’s acclaimed contemporary British play, the whole thing is really only just beginning to sink in and […]
Stuart Hess Minister of Justice Dullah Omar has asked for a report into Western Cape Attorney General, Frank Khan’s decision not to prosecute a former police superintendent accused of sexually harassing a colleague for six years. Khan twice declined to prosecute Mario Laubscher, on the grounds that he was suffering from depression. Carol van der […]
Jacques Magliolo If you’re in the enviable position to have enough money to invest in unit trusts, chances are you’ve been encouraged to invest part of your portfolio in bonds. But bonds appear to be complicated, jargon-laden creatures with names like the “benchmark” R150. Actually, they are simply loans. For instance, if the South African […]
Suzy Bell Alfred Hitchcock fans will drool, and politically-sussed bhangra-babes will ditch their men for the night to watch award-winning Indian director Mani Ratnam’s film Irwar (The Duo). Yep, it’s the 19th Durban International Film Festival and there’s something for everyone among the 20 feature films and four documentaries. The films are mainly from Britain, […]
Dan Atkinson and Mail & Guardian reporter The World Cup hysteria which has obsessed South Africa confirmed the popularity of football, not to mention the power of marketing to induce frenzied emotion. This bodes well for the owners of any football teams which are planning to follow their overseas counterparts and list on the Johannesburg […]
Diane Coetzer For weeks, I tried to prise a CV out of YFM station manager Randall Abrahams. When I met with him at the station’s funkily appointed offices in Gauteng’s Bez Valley, we never really got to the details of Abrahams’s radio career so far, beyond discussing his early days on the University of Cape […]