Jeremy Kuper speaks to Simphiwe Dana, who performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London recently, and brought down the house.
Teenage paceman Ishant Sharma and off-spinner Harbhajan Singh shared six wickets as India restricted South Africa to 265 in the third and final Test in Kanpur on Friday. South Africa were comfortably placed at 152-1 before losing their way on a spin-friendly pitch. Skipper Graeme Smith (69) and Hashim Amla (51) led the way with solid half-centuries.
Zimbabwe raised doubts on Friday over whether President Robert Mugabe would attend an emergency regional summit on the weekend to discuss deepening concern over a post-election deadlock in the country. Officials had earlier said Mugabe was expected to attend the Lusaka summit on Saturday of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community.
Russia will take military and other steps along its borders if ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia join Nato, Russian news agencies quoted the armed forces’ chief of staff as saying on Friday. ”Russia will take steps aimed at ensuring its interests along its borders,” the agencies quoted General Yuri Baluyevsky as saying.
Abbey Makoe, political editor at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), has resigned from the public broadcaster, it said on Friday. Makoe said: ”I am very sad to leave the SABC. Of all the media institutions for which I have worked, I found the SABC the most transformed and progressive.”
President Thabo Mbeki is blatantly violating human rights, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) claimed in a document handed to Amnesty International on Friday. The party’s chief whip, Koos van der Merwe, handed a written complaint against Mbeki to a representative of Amnesty International in Pretoria.
Wole Soyinka is the latest African playwright to be celebrated by local director James Ngcobo, writes Percy Zvomuya.
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African National Congress president Jacob Zuma on Friday said that the issue of bail for those accused of rape and murder needs to be debated. Speaking at the launch of the KwaZulu-Natal Institute of Local Government and Traditional Leadership Fundraising Summit, Zuma said: ”I don’t think we have debated the issue.”
But for a trick of fate, Chris Rock might have been a truck driver. Instead the Brooklyn boy is the "funniest man alive".
Using a team of co-authors, James Patterson has become perhaps the world’s most successful writer.