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/ 12 September 2007
Americans stood in silence to remember the nearly 3 000 people killed in the September 11 attacks on Tuesday as Osama bin Laden resurfaced to praise the suicide hijackers who carried them out six years ago to the day. New Yorkers observed silent moments at the very times jets crashed into the World Trade Centre towers and when each tower collapsed.
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/ 12 September 2007
Samson Mashaba struggles to retain his sense of humour as he waits to see his doctor. ”If you’re unlucky, you’ll die standing here,” says the 69-year-old as he surveys the queue ahead of him at a rural hospital in Mpumalanga. While South Africa may boast some of the finest hospitals on the continent in cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town, rural healthcare is dogged by a lack of cash, personnel and facilities.
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/ 12 September 2007
Should Belgium break up? Would anyone in the rest of the world notice? Should they care? These are some of the questions being raised in a media frenzy both in and outside the country as a political impasse has fanned the flames of separatism in the Dutch-speaking north.
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/ 12 September 2007
Helen Oyeyemi is without doubt a very intelligent writer. Comparisons to Ben Okri, Chinua Achebe and others are not empty literary plaudits. Aptly for a writer tastefully compared with giants such as these, Oyeyemi takes risks.
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/ 12 September 2007
One of the upshots of the Zimbabwe crisis is the number of books deciphering it. Writers go there, spend a few months and decide, after seeing so much crazy stuff going on, that they can write a book. The results, mostly, have been at best half-ignorant books telling us what we already know and, at worst, downright inaccurate fantasies that feed into racist stereotypes.
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/ 12 September 2007
Yasmina Khadra has written a heart-stinging and challenging successor to previous novels The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack. Set mainly in Iraq, it goes straight to the crucial issues and moral debates of our times, which most of us manage to ignore. It begins with violence against the innocent in Iraq and ends with similar violence planned against the perpetrators where, once again, the innocent will be most affected.
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/ 12 September 2007
In his new life Mac Faraday is a blacksmith set up on his late father’s spread not too far from Melbourne. In his old life, he was a senior detective in the Australian federal police, but he left after a stakeout went sour and he’s trying to forget the whole thing. Then his friend on the next farm is found hanging in a machine shed.
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/ 12 September 2007
What is ”the edge of South Africa”? Are we talking about an outer edge, like our jagged coastline, or the serrated blade of our borders to the north? The pieces in this remarkable book — At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (Jonathan Ball), edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall — suggest that the edge of South Africa goes right through its heart.
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/ 12 September 2007
Sir Paul McCartney is rumoured to be stepping out with Renée Zellweger now that the pair have been spotted enjoying a candlelit meal together. It’s good to know that divorce difficulties haven’t put Sir Paul off his food, but can he stomach Zellweger’s appetites?
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/ 11 September 2007
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A magnificent unbroken third-wicket stand of 120 by Herschelle Gibbs and Justin Kemp took South Africa to a thrilling eight-wicket victory over the West Indies in the opening match of the Twenty20 World Championship at the Wanderers on Tuesday night.