Bram Posthumus: FIRST PERSON In the full moonlight, a dozen young men were standing around our car, its front wheels jammed solid in the mud. One shouted the now familiar command: “Leggo! Leggo!”, Liberian English for “Heave!” The men grunted, the engine roared and the car finally sped away, leaving the small group covered in […]

Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon Since this week’s column is devoted to a passionate defence of Ms Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, I think I’m going to have to settle for using her initials: FMS. This might make her sound a bit like a financial house – which she has recently hinted she is – but it’s necessary. When […]

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 […]

Too often South Africa’s transitional government has been held up as a model for other countries undergoing profound political change. Usually wrongly. But this country does offer a good example to Nigeria as its military regime gropes its way in the wake of the deaths of former dictator Sani Abacha and the man elected president […]

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 […]

Robin McKie If there is a gene for causing uproar, Craig Venter has it. More importantly, he is also the man most likely to isolate it. In the predatory world of advanced biotechnology, Venter — head of the Institute of Genomics Research in Maryland – is regarded as a deadly member of a breed of […]

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 […]

than the mail Douglas Rushkoff Online Never, ever, respond to an e-mail advert again. You’ll be doing yourself and the rest of us trying to work or play on the Internet a big favour. I’ve made a habit, perhaps even an ethic, of shrugging off commercial advances on the Internet. Since the real estate in […]

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 […]

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 […]