Significant developments are underway to integrate Grahamstown’s impoverished periphery into the National Arts Festival, both economically and culturally. Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon takes to the townships in search of the other National Arts Festival.
If the South African government had rolled out anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs as fast as it could have, 75 000 lives could have been saved in 2005 alone, the International Aids Conference in Toronto, Canada, heard on Thursday. Parliament was also criticised for not holding the government accountable for expenditure on HIV/Aids.
Claims that two South Africans — one working for the country’s embassy in Bujumbura and the other an intelligence agent from Pretoria — have been involved in concocting a fake coup in Burundi resurfaced recently. Fifteen opposition leaders were accused at the end of last month of plotting a coup against Pierre Nkurunziza’s almost year-old Burundian government.
Artist Joachim Schönfeldt handed his highly coded images to two writers in an experiment that explores crossing genres, multifocal scrutiny and questions the ways in which image and text relate. Muff Andersson takes a closer look.
There is a section of Zimbabwe’s beleaguered society that is literally smiling all the way to the bank ahead of Monday’s deadline, under which locals are supposed to have deposited the old currency to pave way for a new set of bearer cheques — and that is the country’s commercial traders. The looming deadline has provoked panic buying.
It was groundhog day for the South African government at the 16th International Aids Conference in Toronto this week, when a display of salad ingredients drew attention to the more controversial aspects of the national responses to HIV/Aids. The South African government stand was invaded by Treatment Action Campaign activists, some lying on the ground to symbolise South Africa’s Aids dead.
Naomi Campbell refers to Nelson Mandela, as is the custom among famous young women who have met him at least twice, as ”granddad”. Emma Brockes talks to Ms Campbell, currently in South Africa for the birthday of an old friend.
From September 18 to 21, I will have the honour of presiding over the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s (Cosatu) ninth national congress, at which more than 3 000 delegates from our 20 affiliated unions will hammer out a programme for the next three years and elect a leadership.
If you’re ever stuck for a tie-break question to decide a pub quiz, try this: How many Oscars has the British government won? This is not a joke about Tony Blair’s thespian tendencies; the answer is two. In 1944, the ministry of information’s Desert Victory won the first-ever Academy Award for documentary; and two years later the trophy was shared with the United States government for The True Glory.
Following the runaway success of popular US sicom Will & Grace, it appears that US television is coming out of the closet and is embracing more gay-themed content on the box these days. The creators of the hit series tell Matt Wells about the show’s inspiration.