MAIL & GUARDIAN REPORTER, Johannesburg | Friday SOUTH African husbands, partners or lovers would probably have loved to be a fly on the wall on the Park Hyatt hotel ballroom in Rosebank, Johannesburg, on Tuesday night. The conversation over the foie gras and wine was positively scandalous. “Oh my God!” shrieked a woman standing near […]
PEDRO STEENKAMP, Walvis Bay | Friday NOT even the veteran fishermen in Walvis Bay can say exactly what is wrong. They can only speculate why the shoals of nearly all the fish species along the Namibian coast have vanished. But it’s a fact, they said: for nearly the whole of the past two months, the […]
Barry Streek The South Africa-Zimbabwe border is leaking like a sieve with more than 200 holes in the security fence around the Beitbridge border post, army patrols that only come on duty at 10pm and widespread fraud and corruption. This has been reported by the National Assembly’s portfolio committee on home affairs. “We saw many […]
Cheryl Goodenough Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Joyce Mabudafhasi has called on the youth to make their voices heard on environmental issues and to mobilise ahead of the World Summit for Sustainable Development, to be held in Johannesburg next year. Mabudafhasi made her call to the 400 delegates from 27 countries who converged […]
whipping boy The KwaZulu-Natal season is still in full swing and on Saturday comes the chance for a choice selection of sprinters to show what they are made of in the R250 000 grade one Mercury Sprint at Clairwood Park. The Mercury is a weight-for-age event, meaning that in these final weeks of the season […]
Stephen Gray Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce (Bloomsbury) With the centenary of South Africa’s macho poet, Roy Campbell, in view he was born on October 2 1901 Joseph Pearce has taken the opportunity for a timely reappraisal. Despite his curious title, the work is a straight account […]
When other black artists of his generation went abroad, he remained in South Africa to make his name GEORGE PEMBA George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba, one of the pioneers of painting among South African black artists, has died. Pemba, who was born in Korsten Village, Port Elizabeth, in 1912, attended the Van der Kemp Mission Primary […]
Jeremy Cronin The key achievement of the South African Communist Party through the 1990s has been to rethink the communist project, neither abandoning nor being complacent about our legacy. We have carried through this rethinking, not as an intellectual curiosity, but in the midst of making ongoing, sometimes decisive, contributions to one of the great […]
Paul Kirk Joe Modise, the former minister of defence and one of the figures central to the multi-agency probe into corruption in South Africa’s R50-billion arms deal, had a six-bedroom mansion constructed partly at the expense of state-owned armaments company Denel which operates with taxpayers’ money. This week the National Directorate of Public Prosecutions confirmed […]
Nawaal Deane The Road Accident Fund has watered down its controversial plans to require its legal representatives to hire only black professionals. This follows a Mail & Guardian report in June on the fund’s affirmative action policy, instructing law firms acting on its behalf to avoid using white advocates to defend their cases. The fund […]