Frank Keating on the single most important object in myriad sports, so frequently overlooked Etched as it is so vividly in the memory, it could easily be, oh, just a handful of Christmas mornings ago. In fact I was four, and next week fully 60 Christmases have gone since then. If not a reindeer hoof […]

Belinda Beresford The government is seeking to head off a slew of future legal attacks that could force it to honour the socio-economic obligations enshrined in the Constitution. The Department of Health will ask the Constitutional Court to overturn last week’s Pretoria High Court judgement that it must provide anti-retroviral drugs in the public sector […]

An inept display in Adelaide has left South Africa with an enormous task Peter Robinson Well, if nothing else Shaun Pollock’s South Africans know exactly what they need to do in the next two Test matches bat better, bowl better and catch better. This accomplished, the series should be a doddle. It’s difficult to be […]

Pat Hopkins A nude reclines on a palm-fringed beach. Another plays the sax for leering men. A lap dance. A blow job. A village orgy. In each of these murals is a khuwana a beer-pot. The N1 the Great North Road from Cape to Cairo winds through the affluent eastern suburbs of Pretoria before straightening […]

Who is this Father Christmas guy, and how is it that he exerts such hypnotic power? asks John Matshikiza I don’t know where the whole thing started. But it would be discourteous, in this season of good cheer, to point fingers at any other member of the family. Suffice it to say that, somewhere between […]

Stefaans Brmmer and Mungo Soggot Cell C was tight-lipped this week about its settlement with three businessmen who in a bizarre lawsuit accused the cellular operator’s Saudi owners of not paying them a $2-million”success fee” for helping to secure its licence. The settlement with Cell C’s owner, Saudi Oger, was struck with Alfred Oosthuizen, formerly […]

… From pantos to Boney M. Thebe Mabanga on what we can look forward to this season Bad entertainment is as much a feature of the season to be merry as is long-distance travelling and expensive wine in celebrating the birth of a Jewish boy who changed society in only 33 years. In subtle form […]

Phaswane Mpe on life in Hillbrow You alight from a minibus taxi in Noord Street, Johannesburg, for the first time in your life. Suddenly, you feel that there is a problem. Only, you are not sure whether you are the problem or the problem is around you. You remember what you were told when you […]

South Africa and the global economy Andrew Feinstein When I arrived at the University of Cambridge to undertake postgraduate studies in economics, a famed post-Keynesian professor asked me where I had done my undergraduate economics. I responded that I hadn’t, that my first two degrees had been in clinical psychology.”A far better training for studying […]

There are, these days, supposed to be no victims no living ones, anyway. There are only survivors. There are rape survivors, Aids survivors, racism survivors, assault survivors you name it. I am an African National Congress survivor. Only the dead, it seems, can now respectably lay claim to having been victims. And the dead, as […]