Wonder Hlongwa The offices of three southern Cape newspapers have been burnt to the ground in an apparent revenge attack for reporting on the activities of gangs in the Hangklip area. The offices of the Hangklip Herald, Hermanus Herald and Gansbaai Herald were set alight in the early hours of last Monday morning. A petrol […]
Shaun de Waal CD of the week The Bassline in Melville, Johannesburg, has proved itself to be one of the city’s most reliable jazz joints, perhaps even its best. Everyone who is anyone in South African jazz has played there, and this CD, Jazz at the Bassline (Sheer Sound), collects 12 works by this country’s […]
Andy Duffy Psychiatric patients treated and released by Western Cape health authorities have killed seven people over the past 18 months, including two children, amid an apparent collapse in the system set up to monitor them. The former patients, all from the high- security forensic unit at Cape Town’s Valkenberg hospital, represent a small proportion […]
Charlene Smith The National Party continued its string of humiliating local government by-election defeats this week, polling a paltry 22 votes in the mixed coloured and African council ward of Bloekombos in the Western Cape. And an NP councillor, Bill Schibbe, who defected to the Democratic Party on Thursday said it was time for the […]
FRIDAY, 6.30PM: A NATIONAL Party MP, Donald Lee, has defected to the Democratic Party, adding to the blows dealt this week and last week by by-election defeats in which the NP lost long-standing strongholds to the DP. Douglas Gibson of the DP said that Lee’s move reflects a dramatic shift of feeling in South African […]
Andrew Muchineripi Soccer Bafana Bafana coach Philippe Troussier is nothing if not unpredictable. While the media differed over which personnel he would deploy against Zambia at FNB Stadium on Wednesday night, there was consensus on a 3-5-2 formation. So what does the controversial “White Magician” do? He proves once again that he is le boss […]
Andrew Worsdale and Phillip Kakaza Announcing at the Cannes Film Festival this week that he would begin shooting the film of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in October, South African producer Anant Singh said he was still searching for the right man to play the lead role. He said he hoped to find an African for that […]
Gary Younge in Makeni The rebels came for Kulo Korban on Saturday night. They left him with a letter and took away three of his fingers and both ears. “I was asleep when I heard a knock on the door. Then four men kicked it down and dragged me away. They tied me to a […]
I never thought I was the type who’d join a cult. But I did. It’s not a cult of personality, but of technology. It’s the cult of the PalmPilot – a simple hand-held computer and operating system that now accounts for over 60% of the global personal digital assistant (PDA) market. Most religious cults attract […]
South African art triumphed at a huge French show. Brenda Atkinson was there So there I was in Paris, filled with strawberries and red wine, mingling with a 2 000-odd crowd of the young, hip, gorgeous and powerful. If these people sweat, I thought, then they sweat pure CK-One. Let no one tell you that […]