A paediatrician’s love of orchids led to the discovery that big doses of garlic could triumph over infection, writes Michael Nurok The Roman statesman Cicero advised that one should eat to live, not live to eat. Little did he know that more than 2 000 years later, gravely ill patients at Cape Town hospitals might […]

Shot dead at a taxi rank this week, James Zulu is more likely to be remembered as an Inkatha warlord than the great leader he could have been, writes Jesper Strudsholm The South Coast Herald once branded James Zulu “a warlord”. Zulu threatened to take the editor to court for defamation, but the paper was […]

Education’s financial crisis is having a devastating impact on South Africa’s publishers of textbooks, writes Swapna Prabhakaran South African educational publishers face lean times as the Department of Education shifts gears, changing its approach to implementation of the new outcomes-based Curriculum 2005. While the new curriculum does require new textbooks, the department has sidestepped its […]

Jane Rosenthal WAY UP WAY OUT by Harold Strachan (David Philip, R42,99) It’s a strange practice this, of putting out a brand new novel, first print run of the first edition, with snippets of review-type comment already adorning the cover. Way Up Way Out has been done in this way. And it’s not just any […]

Tangeni Amupadhi South Africa’s police watchdog is probing the handling of the slaying of six-month old Angelina Zwane on a Benoni plot this week. Advocate Neville Melville, the executive director of the Independent Complaints Directorate, has dispatched a team of two to investigate why the farmer involved in the shooting was not arrested immediately after […]

Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON At our peril we are all ignoring another fine example Dr Nkosazana Zuma has given us of audacious democratic management skills. Especially when it comes to applying discipline to insolent apartheid-residual control bodies, Nkosazana leads the way. As they say in the good book: if thine hand offends thee, cut it […]

Despite facing stringent budget cuts, the military has paid out hefty merit bonuses – mainly to white officers, writes Mungo Soggot The Ministry of Defence is probing the armed forces’ decision to pay officers R77-million in performance bonuses, nearly all of which went to white officers of the former South African Defence Force (SADF). Amid […]

Gareth Patterson: A SECOND LOOK The hunting fraternity initially blamed the animal rights lobby for the expos of “canned” lion hunting last year. They said it was a means of tarring South Africa’s conservation image just prior to the June meeting of the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species and of dampening the Southern […]

Anna Borzello in Kampala A coalition force of Ugandan rebels, Sudanese government troops and former fighters of ousted Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko is operating from bases in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Garamba, in the north-east of Congo, borders Sudan to the […]

As the dust of an almost bewildering media storm finally begins to settle around Breyten Breytenbach’s Boklied, Charl Blignaut asks what the reaction to the play means One should have smelled it from a mile off, really, the faint whiff of scandal rising from the Boklied posters mingling with the cloying fragrance of potpourri and […]