Nigeria Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka visited South Africa for a writers’ festival in Durban. He spoke to Suzy Bell A distinguished man in black sips a cold Amstel in the retro lounge of the Blue Waters Hotel in Durban. He’s Wole Soyinka, acclaimed playwright, essayist, novelist and memoirist. He’s the quietly spoken winner of the […]
Charl Blignaut: On stage in Johannesburg There’s a very cool moment in Ilse van Hemert’s Mallemeulwals when Sandra Prinsloo, playing a glamorous and world-weary leading lady in turn-of-the-century France, gazes lazily into space and proclaims, “Love does not exist.” It’s a point she gets to prove just moments later as she plunges into bed with […]
Mish Middelmann: REALITY BYTES So there are all these cool ways of creating digital content, from word processors through voice recognition to digital cameras. But what about the stuff you get on plain old paper? Scanners are the things that turn paper documents into digital form, and nowadays they go together with optical character recognition […]
Janet Smith On show in Pretoria When your eye first catches the glitter and runs over the roughness of the sand, you don’t see the exquisite miniatures occupying spaces that would otherwise reveal emptiness. On more intimate inspection, it becomes evident that there’s performance in every part of Motlhabane Mashiangwako’s The Efforts of Those Who […]
Lizeka Mda: CITY LIMITS Andr Wessels (not his real name) still remembers the time when Indians were kicked out of Pageview, an area to the west of Braamfontein station that was predominantly Indian at the time. He was jubilant, and so was everyone else he knew. They would shout “Gaan terug [go back], coolies!” as […]
Adam Haupt The University of Cape Town’s Contemporary African Music and Arts Archive (Cama) got its African Alchemy project started with a workshop, which was facilitated by musician, producer and artist Brian Eno. The obvious connection to be made here is with the forthcoming visit of mega pop group U2’s Popmart tour – Eno produced […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi Divisions within the African National Congress’s top structures this week spared Gauteng MEC for Safety and Security Jessie Duarte her job for the time being, despite growing pressure on Premier Mathole Motshekga to sack her. Senior officials in the party are said to have been furious at Duarte’s decision this week to withdraw […]
Vatmaar, the Afrikaans novel by a man in his 70s which won the M-Net and the CNAprizes, recently elicited a heated auction among German publishers. The rights to a German translation were finally sold to Luchterhand, a literary house with a good reputation, for a high five-figure sum. Vatmaar has already been published Meulenhoff in […]
Andy Duffy Nine of the 10 deans at the University of Cape Town (UCT) are to be replaced as part of an aggressive affirmative action drive and management shake-up. The university is also putting all staff through rigorous performance checks, to weed out underachievers and free up posts for new black and female employees. All […]
FRIDAY, 6.00PM: SHARES on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange staged a late rally after a dull day on Friday, much to the consternation of dealers who were at a loss to explain the recovery. The all gold index slipped 2,1 points to 742,7. The industrial index rose 69,9 points to 8187,2, and the financial index, 103,3 […]