Filmmaker Lionel Ngakane, who has died at the age of 83, was born in 1920 and educated at Fort Hare University College and Wits University. From 1948 to 1950 he worked on Zonk and Drum magazines.

As Parliament closed this week for its year-end recess, several key Bills — on child welfare and justice, communal land rights, sexual offences and others — remain pending. Several key Bills, including the Mineral and Petroleum Bill, are hanging in the air as Parliament goes into recess

The most thorough review of its public representatives yet could see the African National Congress leadership rejig the provisional electoral lists to exclude the scandal-ridden and troublesome; move more women into higher spots; and increase the representation of the trade unions and the South African Communist Party.

Growth in internet access in South Africa will receive a kick-start in 2004 after a dramatic slowdown in the past three years, says internet analyst Arthur Goldstuck.
"From having no choice at all, the South African market will suddenly be faced with two new players who are both eager to supply internet access needs," he said.

United States military authorities at Guantanamo Bay have not finished interrogating seven of the nine British detainees and have yet to decide whether ”they have done something wrong”, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said on Thursday, nearly two years after the prison camp was set up in Cuba.

They come in small groups, old men and young couples, streaming into the cemetery, three miles outside Kabul. The pilgrims hush and head for a concrete mausoleum among the cluttered graves. Its design is unremarkable: six concrete arches reaching up to a four-metre marble-tiled dome. Yet, to Afghan music lovers, this is Memphis.

At least 163 people drowned and more than 100 were missing yesterday after two overcrowded ferries collided in a storm on a lake in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Survivors spoke of hundreds of people thrown into wind-whipped waters when the two ferries hit each other.