Five lucky Friday readers can each win a set of five volumes in the recently relaunched Oxford World’s Classics series -Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. All […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Only a masochist would beg their bank to be allowed to shovel ever- increasing chunks of their salary in to the gaping maw of bond repayments, and to do it twice a month. Or someone who knew that, bizarrely, it could prove quite profitable. According to Standard Bank, by splitting your bond repayment in two, […]

Larry Elliott and Alex Brummers A Second Look From the offices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in downtown Washington, DC, the ambush of the Thai baht by currency speculators a year ago this week looked like a brief but violent tropical storm. That great edifice, globalisation, had sprung a leak, but the problem was […]

Tracy Murinik On show in Cape Town Just in case you overlooked him, I can report that Caliban is, indeed, alive and well, and effectively leaving many a little speechless and thunderstruck in his eloquent wake. Mustafa Maluka’s latest solo exhibition in the Artsstrip at the AVA, entitled (the (UNSTOPPABLE) rapist), engages, through an elaborate […]

Alex Dodd Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu has been accused of old-order politics by South Africa’s chief censor after she threatened to ban an art exhibition of child nudes at the Grahamstown arts festival. The row between the two was sparked by artist Mark Hipper’s exhibition Viscera, on show at the Rhodes University […]