Shaun de Waal pays tribute to one of South Africa’s leading poets, Mazizi Kunene, who died last week.
<b>NOT THE MOVIE OF THE WEEK:</b> The trouble with M Night Shyamalan’s <i>Lady in the Water</i> is not just that it is boring, predictable and laughably absurd; it’s that it is so obviously contrived, writes Shaun de Waal.
Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, the first black South African to achieve his doctorate in literature, would have turned 100 this year, writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
<b>CD OF THE WEEK:</b> Dudley Perkins is the funkiest cat in hip-hop since Humpty Hump emerged in the 1990s selling Digital Underground sex packets, writes Kwanele Sosibo.
Shoprite Checkers and the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union (Saccawu) would begin talks on Friday to end a pay strike by workers, the union said. Saccawu has demanded the greater of a wage increase of R300 or 10%, and improved working conditions. Shoprite has offered R265.
Leaders of Côte d’Ivoire’s main opposition parties and rebels on Thursday jointly rejected anew President Laurent Gbagbo’s attempts to extend his mandate beyond an October deadline set for elections. The country’s main opposition parties and the New Forces rebels roundly accused Gbagbo of wanting to seize power.
Search-and-rescue teams kept up frantic efforts on Friday to save thousands marooned by fatal flash floods in south-west Ethiopia where relief workers reported near-total devastation. Already, nearly 900 people in southern, eastern and northern Ethiopia have been reported dead or missing in the past two weeks.
Subconsciously or not, golf’s stragglers settle in for a quiet, tidy conclusion to their work, risking little and consolidating their places. It’s the way golf is. It’s a great sport, but is primarily a vehicle to shift shirts, clubs and awful trousers. And the workers at the coalface are part of that, seriously well paid for being no better, mostly, than competent.
An oil slick in the central Philippines that has devastated more than 300km of coastline is likely to spread much further unless international help is deployed quickly to salvage the ship that caused the disaster, officials warned on Thursday.
A little more than a year ago it did not exist. Today it is viewed more than 100-million times a day and has become one of the most spectacular success stories of the internet in recent years. Now YouTube has announced plans that observers say could revolutionise the music industry and threaten even the online music giant iTunes.