Tango at the festival They’re doing the tango in Isidingo, Al Pacino did it in Scent of a Woman, director Sally Potter found her feet with The Tango Lesson, and great Spanish film-maker Carlos Sauro gave up political protest for the consuming fires of tango and flamenco. At the festival, Tango del Fuego, directed by […]
Fred Esbend The provision of primary health care in the Eastern Cape is hanging in the balance after the provincial MEC for Health, Dr Bevan Gogqana, refused to bail out the western district of Nelson Mandela, which encompasses Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Despatch. A gloomy picture of the state of health services in the area […]
Soweto residents are calling on authorities to intervene as Eskom continues to cut off their electricity Glenda Daniels The African National Congress stands to lose substantial support in Soweto if it does not intervene in the township’s electricity crisis arguably the most serious crisis the biggest township in the country has faced since democracy. Soweto […]
Evidence wa ka Ngobeni The disgraced former chair of the Central Energy Fund (CEF) awarded the head of the state oil company an annual salary of R1,2-million without following proper civil service procedures. Keith Kunene gave Renosi Mokate, CEO of the CEF, the R100 000 a month salary without consulting the parastatal’s board or seeking […]
Lauren Shantall FINEART The village of Zuney hasn’t felt the shudder of a locomotive in more than a decade. The abandoned metal tracks have gone to rusty seed, overgrown with weeds, the wooden sleepers lie dormant, rotting. Once a day, many years ago, the linked carriages en route from Port Elizabeth to Port Alfred would […]
Valentine Cascarino food Although Mozambican cuisine is one of the most delicious in Africa, it nevertheless requires patience from patrons as most meals take about two to three hours to prepare. But it’s worth the wait if you want first-hand experience of a cuisine that goes beyond prawns peri-peri, entering a realm caught up between […]
Niel Sonnekus This year’s Standard Bank National Arts Film Festival ranges from the darkly confrontational to the classic, with plenty of space for the experimental, the local and the sadomasochistic in between. Heading the festival is the work of Durban-bred film-maker Ian Kerkhof, who lived in Amsterdam from 1983 to 1999 because he didn’t “feel […]
Marianne Merten An intricate web of gangsters, anti-drug vigilantes, a schoolboy drug dealer and a suspected corrupt policeman operating in the Cape Flats underworld has emerged in Cape Town courts. Two leading members of the Americans gang are applying for bail on Friday June 8 after being arrested in connection with almost 2 000 Mandrax […]
Gavin Foster Because it lacked a low-range transmission option and ground clearance wasn’t really adequate for serious off-road use, Land Rover’s Freelander has always been more of a shopping mall scout than an all-African adventurer. But although some other not-so-macho four-wheel drive vehicles are similarly handicapped, the 1,8 litre petrol-engined Freelander is further disadvantaged by […]
Maris McCance-Price and Scott Smith French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said ”a world of words is a world of things”. Words are the building blocks of everything we do, but in the materialistic cellphone and Internet culture of the 21st century, the world of things often takes precedence over the appreciation of literature and poetry: the […]