Back in 1990 I ”modelled” in a show for Romeo Gigli in Milan. It was a humiliating experience because I was the least gifted of all the male models. But mostly it was my legs that let me down. This was a skinny-legged year in Italian fashion and my prop-forward pins were too unfashionably beefy for the yellow pants I was poured into, writes Simon Mills.
Inside her cottage behind her employers’ house in Observatory, Johannesburg, 47-year-old Flora Thembo, a domestic worker, sits next to what looks like at least several months’ supply of foodstuffs and other consumables. Some of the goods sit in their original packaging, others have been pushed into disused barrels and empty paint containers.
In the flurry surrounding the police crime statistics, one might think crime is the exclusive property of the poor and powerless. Socioeconomic factors obviously play a role, but the picture is not that simple. Justice Albie Sachs famously remarked that patriarchy was South Africa’s only truly nonracial institution.
If Mbulelo Goniwe wants to get his parliamentary salary back, it will not be enough to sue the legislature; he is going to have to take the ANC to court, too. “Members of the National Assembly are members of the National Assembly at the instance of their respective political parties [and] they serve at the pleasure of their parties. The speaker [of the National Assembly] has got nothing to do with it,” Judge James Yekiso told Ntsiki Sandi, Goniwe’s counsel.
The Competition Commission inquiry into banking costs and charges has been a South African first. Until now banks have operated largely as a cosy cartel, but since the commission first started asking questions, better banking models have been suggested, writes Maya Fisher-French.
It is not the kind of militaristic statement expected of the peace-loving Canadians. In front of a choreographed line-up of 120 sailors in their summer whites at a naval base outside Victoria in British Columbia, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, gave a warning to other nations with their eye on the potentially oil-rich Arctic.
South Africa’s white and black workers are increasingly finding common ground, as shown by their joint participation in the public service and metal industries strikes. The Mail & Guardian‘s Matuma Letsoalo poses questions to Dirk Hermann, the deputy general secretary of the union Solidarity.
Howard West draws up a marketing plan for the launch of a vehicle insurance company’s new call centre for southern Africa that will offer its services in 13 languages.
A weaker appetite for expensive cars and other imported goods in South Africa could have dire consequences for some of the poorest countries in the region, economists and officials at the national treasury have warned. South Africa’s consumer boom has been financing a huge — and disturbingly fragile — surge in the budgets of other countries in the Southern African Customs Union.
Earlier this week news from Pakistan was dominated by the siege at the Red Mosque, which ended late on Tuesday. Scarcely a mile from the seat of power in Islamabad, the madrasa students and their two leading clerics inside the mosque first claimed attention with kidnappings, threats of suicide bombings and demands for the imposition of sharia law.