Iden Wetherell Thabo Mbeki’s mission to broker a solution to Zimbabwe’s protracted land crisis has ended impaled on the rock of President Robert Mugabe’s monumental ego, it became clear this week. In Harare two weeks ago for talks with Mugabe ahead of a crucial visit by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s envoy Mark Malloch […]

Working-class hero? My arse! He was about as working class as a suburban dentist. Sexy? He was hideous, says Julie Burchill I don’t normally feel the need to return to the scene of a hate-crime once I’ve dissed ’em, they stay dissed but in John Lennon’s case, I will make?an exception. John Lennon! Even his […]

Keith Richards: He wasn’t just a mate of mine, he was a mate of?everybody’s, really. There were the Beatles and there was John. As a band, they were a great?unit. But John, he was his own man. My father just passed away and he?winked at me just before he died. I really feel a lot […]

Ilda Jacobs and Justin Arenstein An underground organisation of racist South African exiles is using the Internet to recruit supporters and plan for the return of “civilised” white rule to South Africa and Zimbabwe. The London-based Springbok Club slams “gutless” white liberals for betraying their race by “toadying” up to the African National Congress, and […]

Peter Preston London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus) What is London? The disaster of the Dome, the grunge of traffic, the cost, the crime, the desolation living rough beneath its arches. Familiar fodder from familiar headlines. Moan, moan, moan (as my Spanish grandson says when he comes to visit). But here, by […]

Medals galore at the Olympics. A world-beating rugby team. A hat-trick of Test victories. England has waited a long time for sporting success and now it seems it won’t stop coming Richard Williams Perhaps the best thing about a prolonged period of humiliation on the sports field is that it has taught the English not […]

Susan Chala and Pule waga Mabe Every child knows what Santa Claus familiarly known as Father Christmas looks like. White, with a long white beard, wearing a red-and-white suit and sporting a large, round stomach. The Santa Claus at Southgate Mall does wear a red-and-white suit, but otherwise he’s tall, young, thin, beardless and white. […]

Provinces are bracing themselves for the gradual erosion of their powers as the new local government structures come into effect this month Jaspreet Kindra Provincial governments over the next few years will be reduced to performing a policy role with most of their administrative powers having been delegated to the district councils and municipalities. Some […]

But for all the turmoil, the prospects for healthy reform have never been better David Macfarlane Tottering universities, technikon turmoil, widespread academic demotivation and insecurity, resentful distance education institutions, simmering teacher unions, outraged private-education providers, 45% adult illiteracy, crisis in adult basic education and training … To say that the education year 2000 has been […]

Gone are the friendly mom-and-pop porn stores of yesterday. Stiff competition has reduced the terrain to three big names Matthew Burbidge and Matthew Krouse South Africans don’t tend to dump their illicit sex lives in tacky red-light districts. Rather, they take their lusts to upmarket suburbs where, these days, one finds hookers who rival Whitney […]