Philip French Movie of the week The cinema has done quite well by Oscar Wilde’s work. There have been versions of Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger; a plush Alexander Korda film of An Ideal Husband; a superbly cast The Importance of Being Ernest with Edith Evans’s definitive Lady Bracknell; Albert Lewin’s […]
As the Internet spreads like wildfire across the African continent, Mike Jensen assesses our relative connectivity levels The Internet has spread rapidly through Africa over the last 18 months. In May 1996 only 16 countries had full Internet access. Now more than three- quarters of the capital cities in Africa are online – 44 of […]
Special Mail &Guardian supplement on Internet connectivity in Africa Developing Africa’s information economy is of paramount importance, writes David Shapshak The Internet will finally take off in Africa in 1998. But taking the information age into the continent, which dramatically lacks the infrastructure needed for conveying the Internet and normal telecommunications, may prove to be […]
Chris Roper South African CD of the week The first words that the gravelly-voiced Arno Carstens croons on the opening track of The Springbok Nude Girls’ new CD, Omnisofa (Sony Music), are “we’re going to grow you up slowly”. It wouldn’t be too fanciful to imagine this as referring to the relationship between the band […]
Catherine Knox Teenagers as young as 13 and 14 were treated for drug overdoses at last weekend’s annual Splashy Fen music festival, near Underberg, in KwaZulu-Natal. Dr Grant Lindsay, who has been providing emergency services at the festival for the past seven years, said he treated seven to 10 people a night for overdoses or […]
Mike Jensen With the increasing recognition of the importance of the Internet in accelerating development, a number of recent initiatives have improved the prospects for wider access to information and communication networks in Africa. One event which has helped to accelerate connectivity in Africa was the Addis Symposium on Telematics for Development in April 1995. […]
Andy Capostagno John Robbie is fond of saying, “There are only two kinds of people in the world. The Irish and people who wish they were Irish”. I found myself pondering those words while watching Catriona McKiernan burst from the pack, chase the leaders, reel them in and finally trot home in glorious isolation to […]
Krisjan Lemmer The man who gets this year’s Groot Marico public conscience award is Aboobaker Ismail. This week he went further than any other African National Congress official in owning up to responsibility for some of the horrors perpetrated by the “good guys” in the liberation struggle. Appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in […]
So what if the illusionist does trick us? Isn’t that what we want? Martyn Bedford says we must let magic keep its mystique So you’re on your way out of the concert hall, the music of one of the world’s great pianists still reverberating in your ears when someone sidles up alongside you like a […]
Charlene Smith Outside a Johannesburg court, a policeman and private investigators compare notes before testifying at a trial of a major criminal syndicate. The policeman’s original notes came from the private investigators, who in turn were contracted by major medical aid firms to investigate millions of rands worth of fraud. As soon as they came […]