Neil Manthorp: Cricket Contradictions are an integral part of cricket. Without them, the game would be baseball … or something. The three-legged finals of the World Series, beginning on Friday at the MCG between South Africa and Australia, have been preceded by the strangest contradiction of the tour so far. It is this: 1 Hansie […]

The African National Congress in Gauteng has established a task group to examine allegations, reported in the Mail & Guardian last week, that provincial premier Mathole Motshekga fraudulently administered international donor money. The ANC provincial executive decided on an “inquiry into the need for an inquiry” last Saturday, a day after provincial office- bearers said […]

Melvyn Minnaar : Potable pleasures Tradition has been trashed. That’s the general view – not only in Matieland, Melville and Malmesbury, but also in Mozambique – of the terrible Tassenberg Tragedy. The most famous and best-selling red wine in our country has been bastardised. Tassenberg’s label tells a new, sad truth: the contents in the […]

Brenda Atkinson wonders whether Kendell Geers’s recent show was a success. Was it a punchline without a joke? An olive without a Martini? A vetkoek without filling? Was it an ingeniously constructed art event, an accurate barometer of cultural neurosis, or a distorted painting of political intervention gone horribly wrong? It was an exhibition by […]

Ann Eveleth A South African parachute manufacturer has threatened an irate consumer with extortion charges after the skydiver demanded his money back for faulty equipment that could have cost him his life. The Durban-based Chute Shop told Witbank skydiver Paul Ikin it would lay a criminal charge against him if he persisted with his threats […]

A medical programme to eradicate river blindness enters its second decade with great results, writes Anthony Gilbert For centuries, a debilitating, disfiguring and often blinding disease called river blindness (onchocerciasis) has plagued people who live in tropical regions. The disease is endemic in 35 countries, primarily in parts of Central and West Africa and limited […]

Ferial Haffajee South African advertising agencies are hot- footing it into the rest of Africa, often learning as much as they are teaching. Local agencies have partners in agencies in most African countries. Eastern and southern Africa is covered best, although some agencies work in west and north Africa, as well as Mauritius. South Africa’s […]

By Sechaba ka’Nkosi People’s power without the gravy train When the new African National Congress deputy secretary general, Thenjiwe Mtintso, was asked last month what her ambitions in the party were, her answer was simple: “I would like to see our slogan, ‘All power to the people’, implemented in reality.” This may sound mundane, the […]

Marion Edmunds An Israeli conman, posing as a devout Orthodox Jew, has duped Cape Town-based entrepreneurs into investing millions of rands in a fraudulent investment scheme and skipped the country. The SAPS’s Commercial Branch is investigating Shmuel Deri (29), who is alleged to have left about 65 investors, many from Sea Point and Clifton, out […]

Aspasia Karras While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same. Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites. Local government is […]