theft Mail & Guardian reporters The former Umkhonto weSizwe cadre heading the company that controls controversial Aids drug Virodene cut his business teeth in the Southern African criminal underworld. Former colleagues from the African National Congress’s years in exile claim Joshua Nxumalo had a reputation for “getting things done”, and that he specialised in providing […]
Suzy Bell In the light of the West’s insatiable hunger for exotic titbits to feed its cultural appetite, it is inspiring to come across a cross-cultural fusion where integrity has not been compromised. Music for a Harmonious World is a unique collaboration of the Seventh Day Adventist Student Association (SDASA) Chorale, an amateur gospel group […]
The dark genius of trip-hop grew up on mean streets. Most of his friends are still trawling them. Tricky revisits his roots with Kamal Ahmed They call me Tricky for particular reason They say I’m loud Why should I hide? The clouds that linger above Knowle West are not quite grey. If a paint company […]
Nick Paul, resplendent in designer khaki, gets lost in tent town and discovers the Durban July is little more than a freak show July day sits in the middle of Durban’s social calendar like a large, clever, sharp-tongued Berea matron with a fine mind and too much time on her hands. Everyone wants to be […]
Lauren Shantall If A Midsummer Night’s Dream focuses, in part, on the near-disastrous consequences of the generation gap, then director Jesse Knott’s version provides a streetwise, youth-based antidote to the problem facing today’s theatre: how to draw new audiences. She has dramatically revolutionised the original. Located in a dream world that is harrowingly familiar, the […]
The extraordinary breadth and variety of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival is both its strength and a disadvantage, writes Alex Dodd from Grahamstown Try putting the contents of the Internet onto a piece of A4 paper and you’ll get a feel for the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown 1998. Eclectic is a […]
murdered? William Shawcross and Mail & Guardian reporters Was Chief Moshood Abiola murdered? That was the question on everyone’s lips in the villages, towns and cities of Nigeria as the human rights organisation Amnesty International demanded a full independent inquiry into the circumstances around the death in detention of the country’s lost president. “Of all […]
Anthony Egan THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN SURFACE by Kate Turkington (Penguin) Historians, philosophers and even a few theologians have frequently declared the death of God and the end of religion. Yet today we see a religious resurgence on almost all fronts: pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity, often militant Islam, renewed interest in the occult, New […]
Stewart Dalby Spending it The tantrums and antics of some modern chess masters are nothing new, it would seem. Histories of the game tell a story, possibly apocryphal, that the earliest recorded enthusiast in Britain was the Viking King Canute (1016 to 1035). It seems that Canute quarrelled one day when playing Earl Ulf, who […]
European ballet and African dance forms are connecting, writes Phillip Kakaza The sun was too bright for a winter afternoon – not for me, a son of Africa, but for the Birmingham Royal Ballet dancers currently on tour in South Africa. And the English dancers’ interaction with 20 young South African dancers in a match-box […]