Alex Duval Smith in Casamance A quarter of a million West Africans fleeing on foot from fighting in Guinea-Bissau without food or water are heading north into another civil war where they face landmines, hostile Senegalese troops and swamps. As this human emergency advances on Casamance – the region of Senegal where a 16-year independence […]

Fiona Macleod Animal-welfare groups were scrambling madly this week to prevent Roy Plath, a central figure in the “canned” lion-hunting scandal, from exporting 17 lions to a hunting operation in Mozambique. Plath has sold the lions to a professional hunter, Andr Booysen and his father-in-law, Dick de Villiers, who own a farm called Pandane in […]

Andy Capostagno Tennis There is only one thing better than winning Wimbledon and thats winning it again, said the late Arthur Ashe. The 1975 mens champion just about summed up most peoples feelings about the All England Championships. For while Wimbledon is full of cant and class distinctions it is also full of people, and […]

Angella Johnson Pity Philippe Troussier. The Frenchman with the poor interpersonal skills has emerged as the national scapegoat for Bafana Bafana’s less- than-sparkling performance in the World Cup. The charges: that as a foreigner he lacks any real understanding of the way football is played in this country; and that he deliberately sabotaged the first […]

Shaun de Waal CD of the week I aint down here for your money, I aint down here for your love, sings Nick Cave on the first song of the new Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (DGR). Im down here for your soul. Whether playing the hellfire preacher or the devils advocate, […]

Andy Duffy and Megan Voss The government is to send independent investigators into the University of the Transkei (Unitra) – the first time it has wielded the powers of intervention recently created through higher education legislation. The probe, due to start this weekend, will focus on what government officials have termed a “police state” allegedly […]

Ann Eveleth Mothinya Molakeng (53) quit his job as an agricultural extension worker in 1994 to farm the land from which the former government brutally evicted his and 124 other families in 1978. He is still waiting. The commission on land allocation, set up in the dying days of the National Party’s reign, agreed in […]

Stuart Millar He is probably the best-selling poet of all time after William Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. His books have sold more than 10-million copies in English alone. Even now, he is revered as a guru and an inspiration of the New Age movement. But now, 75 years after the publication of his most famous […]

Shaun de Waal BEELTENIS VERBODE by Hennie Aucamp (Human &Rousseau, R79,95) In this book, Hennie Aucamp, one of the leading prose-writers in Afrikaans, collects his reviews, done mostly for the magazine De Kat, of what he calls following the Dutch egodokumente. By that he means biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, collections of letters. Almost all the subjects […]

If youve ever perused the Johannesburg Stock Exchange share pages in search of potential shares and happened on the property section, youll have noticed that there are three separate sectors listed there: property companies, property trusts and property loan stocks. One of the least talked about and underrated of the three is the property loan […]