SOUTH African Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota arrived late on Tuesday in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where he is expected to hold talks with President Joseph Kabila on the formation of a peacekeeping force for the country’s eastern province of Kisangani. Lekota will also meet UN special representative Amos Namanga Ngongi and leaders of […]

DREW FORREST, Johannesburg | Friday FORMER Umkhonto weSizwe (MK)commander and defence minister Joe Modise challenges the principle that one should not speak ill of the dead. At best, his record is an ambiguous one. Modise was of former president Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo’s generation, joining the African National Congress Youth League in 1947 and […]

THULI NHLAPO, NAWAAL DEANE, Johannesburg | Friday THE Human Rights Commission (HRC) pulled out of helping the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in its landmark challenge to the government on HIV/Aids after the commission’s then chair, Barney Pityana, got a phone call from the state’s advocate. After speaking to the state’s senior counsel, Marumo Moerane, in […]

A MALAWIAN musician, arrested and questioned by police at the weekend, died in hospital on Tuesday in what his family says are suspicious circumstances. The 32-year-old dreadlocked reggae musician, known by his stage name Evison Matafale, was arrested by police in Blantyre Saturday and taken for questioning in Lilongwe, over 300 kilometres away. His arrest […]

PAUL KIRK, Durban | Friday President Thabo Mbeki’s ministerial committee that oversaw the Government’s 66-billion arms acquisition intervened to set conditions for the arms investigation after Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota initially gave investigators carte blanche. The Mail & Guardian reported earlier that the executive invoked sections of the apartheid-era Special Defence Account Act to […]

OVER 140 inmates die in Ugandan prisons every year due to poor conditions, a situation aggravated by the country’s HIV/Aids epidemic, a prisons official said on Thursday. Prison representative Mary Kaddu told reporters at a conference on conditions in African prisons, including human rights, that a report compiled by the prison department showed that over […]

Jo Nel Anatomy of dark: collected poems of arthur nortje edited by Dirk Klopper (Unisa) In 1972, exiled South African critic Lewis Nkosi wrote in The Will to Die: “Time, frustration and despair, with their attendant drugs alcohol and suicide are taking a toll on South African writers. Nat Nakasa. Ingrid Jonker. Now Can Themba […]

A personal account of sexual temptations and their terrifying repercussions Aids is poised to curtail life itself, but for many people, life goes on as if Aids does not exist. And any discussion of HIV/Aids inevitably becomes personal. Just pay attention to this detail from real life in the streets. Not that Aids awareness campaigns […]

Set-top boxes are about to revolutionise the way we “consume” television by making it more interactive David Shapshak When Bill Gates famously ignored the Internet until his equally famous turnaround that propelled Microsoft into its current leading position in numerous Net technologies he thought the next big thing was going to be interactive television. Despite […]