Shaun de Waal On tour On the new Tic Tic Bang! album, Low Riding, two of South Africa’s best young singer- songwriter-guitarists combine their talents to create what could well be the local album of the year. Matthew van der Want and Chris Letcher have meshed to make a multifaceted work full of surprises, an […]
Scholar Apollon Davidson is a living link between Russia and South Africa, writes Shaun de Waal The histories of South Africa and Russia are curiously intertwined, going all the way back to Jan van Riebeeck. In his journal, the first official colonist expressed the desire for help from a Russian with experience in the exploitation […]
leaders SACP Gauteng: RIGHT TO REPLY Sechaba ka’Nkosi’s article, “SACP split over who will lead” (June 19 to 25) uses the politburo meeting held on June 16 as a basis for so-called disunity. From our understanding of South African Communist Party procedures, nominations start at branch level, then go to districts and are finalised at […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi Disillusionment with the African National Congress and hopes of pulling off surprises in next year’s general election made up the vision that guided the United Democratic Movement at its springboard first national congress at the weekend. It became evident that while the black leaders of the party would launch a battle to lure […]
Swapna Prabhakaran A quiet and mostly unseen battle has been raging for months around KwaZulu-Natal’s waste dumps. Two waste dumps were officially closed down last year and another collapsed in a disaster that left the province with a hazardous waste-disposal crisis. The chaos began after floods and mudslides last September wreaked havoc with the province’s […]
Jack Lundin: PERSONAL HISTORY Until a few weeks ago you could have seen him on the corner of Pretoria Street and Quartz: filthy dirty, stinking of glue, begging from cars. Twelve years old and one of the small army of Hillbrow street urchins. My notes on Elias start at 9.50 am on October 1 1996, […]
Province ANC Mukoni T Ratshitanga Northern Province Premier, Ngoako Ramathlodi, who breathed a sigh of relief when he regained his position as provincial chair of the African National Congress last weekend, faces a tough challenge of rooting out ethnic tensions. The province is made up of three former homelands – Lebowa, Venda and Gazankulu – […]
Electronic commerce is on the rise on the World Wide Web. But there are still a number of problems in this new market place, write Alex Brummer and Nicholas Bannister There comes a point with a technological process when the world wakes up to the possibilities of what can be achieved. A decade ago the […]
Brenda Atkinson On show in Pretoria Fernando Alvim speaks a language not readily associated with contemporary South African art. For one thing, it seems not to be artful. It is aware of theory, of art history, but bounces back to these only for cursory back-up of an emotional point. It is lyrical, expressionist, if you […]
Brett Hilton-Barber `I’m an expert in dating early man,” said an American woman. She looked around the conference room where hundreds of scientists were mingling amid fake rocks and designer bushman paintings, and caught the eye of her palaeontologist husband. “That’s my early man,” she smiled. “You could say we’re still dating.” The couple were […]