Alexandra residents take the World Bank to task over plans to expand the Lesotho Highlands Water Project We are a group of low-income residents of Alexandra township, near Sandton. We have filed a formal protest at the World Bank Inspection Panel – the equivalent of its auditor general – against the expansion of the Lesotho […]

Durban will once again host a number of international and South Africa poets, when the second Poetry Africa festival takes place at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, from May 4 to 9. Some 20 poets will present and read from their work and engage in discussion. Jamaican-born musician/poet Linton Kwesi Johnson is the opening-night headliner. Well […]

Tom Quoin : Architecture We will soon have a home for our Constitutional Court. If construction proceeds as expected, it should be ready for occupation early in the year 2000. The building will stand on the upper reaches of the newly named Constitution Hill, north of the painfully memorable Fort, Johannesburg. It will overlook the […]

John Pilger cannot be accused of understating his case, either in his film or this article. Which is fine, but then he musn’t expect others to endorse his polemical views and interpretations. Hence the disclaimer. He says the old SABC sometimes ran critical documentaries by foreign TV journalists and accompanied them with disclaimers like the […]

Michael Brooks looks at the latest cool solution The refrigerator of the future may be cooled by a semiconductor device no bigger than a credit card. There will be no buzz, no moving parts and, most important of all, it will do away with the need for the environment-destroying Freon gases used in conventional refrigerators. […]

Shop around for the best credit card deal available, writes Charlene Smith Despite the entry of more than 70 foreign banks into the local market, the South African commercial banking sector, protected by a R1-million limit on deposits to locally based foreign banks by individuals, is plodding along in its same uncompetitive way – unless […]

Mark Gevisser COUNTRY OF MY SKULL by Antjie Krog (Random House, R90) ‘We boers,” wrote Rian Malan in Business Day recently, “are terminally fed up” with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has become “increasingly irksome to those of us who thought we attained a certain nobility in 1994 by surrendering power to a mistrusted […]

Ferial Haffajee South Africa’s trade mission to Angola jetted into Luanda this week with a mandate to fix what apartheid strong-arm tactics destroyed. Pundits say it will cost Southern Africa more than R50-billion to rebuild the rail and road links the previous government helped to destroy. This week President Nelson Mandela and his trade gurus […]

He always knew he’d have a place in film history. He’s arrogant, precious, pretentious, solipsistic and a bit of a genius. Simon Hattenstone meets Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino jives on to the stage of London’s National Film Theatre. His head nods like a hyperactive chicken. He’s walking the walk, waggling that famously big bottom, preparing […]

Robert Kirby : LOOSE CANNON I keep telling the editor of this paper that he needs to get much more with it, to shrug off the air of 1960s priggish decency that pervades the entire Mail & Guardian enterprise. Just because Jeff Zerbst worked in what were then The Weekly Mail offices shortly before he […]