Staff Reporter
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/ 3 July 1998

Blame it on the banks

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 […]

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/ 3 July 1998

Sporting the brands

Brenda Atkinson I am no fan of sport. I don’t give a toss for its nation-building bumf, I begrudge it its unreserved corporate support, and it brings out the misanthrope in me. But put Bafana Bafana on the box and I’m all patriotic pride and good humour. I get butch and yell things like, “Why […]

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/ 3 July 1998

Sorry ET … your oupa was black

Brett Hilton-Barber Racial differences between people may be a more recent phenomenon than was previously believed. In a paper presented to the Dual Congress of Human Biology and Palaeontology at Sun City this week, renowned academic Dr Christopher Stringer suggested that white skin colour probably emerged only 30 000 years ago. This is some 30 […]

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/ 3 July 1998

`Golden’ future for new party

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 […]

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/ 3 July 1998

Poking fun at you

Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg Pieter Toerien’s Alhambra theatre is the perfect setting for a South African staging of Alan Ayckbourne’s classic Absurd Person Singular. It’s a trademark Ayckbourne nudge-nudge wink-wink; “oh-don’t-worry- about-Tom-he’s-out-there-playing-with-Dick kind of farce”, and the three couples that inhabit the three kitchens during three Christmas eve parties in the play are […]

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/ 3 July 1998

Cutting up the English

Andy Capostagno Rugby What do you say about South Africa 96, Wales 13? It’s difficult to get a true sense of perspective when one team has scored 15 tries and yet is disappointed about not cracking the 100 barrier. Perspective comes with distance and on Saturday I was not at Loftus Versfeld, but at the […]

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/ 3 July 1998

Nico Phooko’s different strokes

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 […]

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/ 3 July 1998

Soul of a virtuoso band

Sam Taylor CD of the week Despite the grim utilitarianism of their name, the Dave Matthews Band are a very strange phenomenon. They are vastly successful – their first two albums, 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming and 1996’s Crash, sold a combined total of 11- million copies in the United States; Before These Crowded […]

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/ 3 July 1998

With Godzilla on our side

How was Wired magazine to have known that Godzilla would prove such a flop? With a three-month lead time, the United States’s pre-eminent futurists are bound to make a few wrong guesses. Putting Godzilla on their June cover, in anticipation that the flick would live up to its hype, probably seemed like a good bet. […]

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/ 3 July 1998

History dumbed down

Anastasia does for history what Bambi did for nature – simplifies it beyond reality, writes Nicci Gerrard I have a dream: that Karl Marx – whose Communist Manifesto was published almost exactly 150 years ago – should come with me to see Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox’s latest offering, Anastasia, which launches Fox Animation Studios, […]