Brenda Atkinson You’ve gotta love the Absa Group. This corporate banking crowd has been quietly ploughing money into local contemporary art for, oh, quite some time now. They continued to build the collection initiated by Volkskas in the days when you couldn’t see the bank tellers for the Van Wouws. They’ve endorsed the Volkskas Bank […]
Karlin Lillington reports on the real power behind innovation on the Web It’s late night in Johannesburg, as a computer screen glows blue with a live video feed. Somewhere in a small studio in mid-afternoon Los Angeles, a sultry blonde with waist-length hair straddles a desk and leaves little to the imagination. Wearing nothing but […]
Craig Bishop Port Elizabeth business leaders, trade unionists and politicians are uncorking the champagne in anticipation of the go- ahead for development of Africa’s first deep-water port at Coega, about 7km outside the city. But a growing band of environmentalists and social critics are determined to take the fizz out of their celebrations. They are […]
Lizeka Mda The Department of Education in the Eastern Cape is in such a chaotic state that branches of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) have called for its scrapping and for the national Department of Education to run education there. And the Cape African Teachers Union recently called upon the Eastern Cape government […]
Who is. . . Abdusalam Abubakar? Chris McGreal and The New York Times One of the few things Nigerians can confidently conclude about their new military leader is that he is no Sani Abacha. General Abdusalam Abubakar is a mild-mannered career soldier who progressed by avoiding the Machiavellian military politics – and coup plots – […]
Derek Malcolm Not quite the movie of the week This year’s Venice festival kicked off with a new work by an old master. At least some would call Woody Allen that – rather more, as he keeps on saying, in Europe than in the United States. He was not in town for the premiere of […]
Chris Roper The Smirnoff International Fashion Awards proved one thing: the fashion world is almost always at least five years behind whatever is culturally and ideologically current. This was brought home to me forcibly when I took my seat and found myself impaled on a glass ashtray. They’re actually encouraging people to smoke in the […]
Antjie Krog’s book on the truth commission has been highly acclaimed. But, argues Claudia Braude, Krog is too creative with the truth Fact, fiction or falsehood? The question is everywhere in reading poet and journalist Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (Random House). It is the first book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), […]
This is a conflict as strangely conducted as it is pointless in origin, writes David Hirst in Zalambesa Zalambesa is a natural pathway for armies. It lies on what, when Eritrea was still a province of Ethiopia, was a main highway between Addis Ababa and Asmara. Set in spectacular landscape of deep gorges, fantastic rock […]
South Africa’s 15-million illiterate people were left in the lurch when the National Literacy Co-operation had to close because of financial irregularities, writes Mungo Soggot The long-awaited forensic probe into the financial scandal that shut South Africa’s biggest literacy organisation reveals expense-account abuse on the part of its national director and mismanagement. The national director […]