South African photographer David Goldblatt’s exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this month. Alex Dodd speaks to him about the structure of things now and then The thing that sticks in my mind about that first conversation with photographer David Goldblatt is his insistence on the absence of a colon. […]

Peter Makurube You would need to be an incurable optimist to believe you’d ever see Philippe Troussier smile. But he did, when Bafana Bafana played Denmark. If you blinked you probably missed it. You’d have to be as much of an optimist to have believed that Tananas, one of South Africa’s best and most successful […]

Sherilee Bridge and Ferial Haffajee The stronger gold price is no guarantee the haemorrhaging of jobs in the mining industry will cease, although trade unions are likely to use it as a bargaining tool. The National Union of Mineworkers said this week it will begin to negotiate the recall of thousands of retrenched workers and […]

Contrary to popular opinion, speculators did not spell doom for the rand, reports Donna Block The United States Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, is due to visit South Africa in about 10 days time, and when he gets here he is not likely to be very sympathetic to the bleatings of the South African […]

Stephen Bierley Tennis The warning from Russia’s Yevgeny Kafelnikov is brutally blunt: “Tennis has a big problem and is slowly going downhill. We definitely need to make some changes.” Nobody in their right mind would ever pretend that tennis, an essentially middle- class game, could ever rival football or any other of the world’s major […]

Mukoni T Ratshitanga Golden Miles Bhudu, the outspoken president of the South African Prisoners’ Organisation for Human Rights (Sapohr) and a former member of the African National Congress, has crossed the political floor to join Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement. Bhudu joined the ANC in 1991, but has not renewed his membership since, although he […]

Paul Martin Wimbledon The weight of Wimbledon has, literally, frustrated Wayne Ferreira’s quest for glory on what should be his best surface – grass. He is complaining not so much about the weight of his own expectations, but rather about the heaviness of the tennis balls now being used in the men’s game. This is […]

Phillip Kakaza Nico Phooko is a versatile young man. He is an artist and a musician. Although his focus is on his art, one cannot separate his artistic output from his professional skills and insight as a musician. “If I find difficulties in singing a song, then I take a paintbrush and depict the emotions […]

Sechaba ka’Nkosi and Rehad Desai The gauntlet thrown down to the South African Communist Party on Wednesday by President Nelson Mandela could be the final bell for the SACP in its battle to re-establish itself as an effective political force on the South African landscape. Mandela’s tough speech to delegates at the SACP’s 10th national […]

say hemp farmers Ferial Haffajee Major South African companies, in conjunction with the government, are funding research into hemp production at the country’s first experimental cannabis farms. Among them are Mercedes Benz South Africa, PG Bison and Masonite Africa. The farms, around the country, are controlled by the Agricultural Research Council and supported by the […]