Two years after taking to the stage in his first one-man show, Marc Lottering is the most popular performer on Cape Town’s burgeoning stand-up comedyscene RyanFortune It’s an unseasonably cool Thursday evening in Cape Town, but On Broadway in Green Point is packed to capacity for Marc Lottering, the lank-limbed, bushy-haired comedian who seems unstoppable […]

Art aside, the touring Marc Chagall extravaganza is a defining moment in South Africa’s emergence from cultural isolation Kathryn Smith When a major Marc Chagall exhibition was announced at a rather lavish reception at Standard Bank headquarters earlier this year, my first impulsive thoughts were, why Chagall? If the French wanted to showcase their cultural […]

Shelley van der Merwe was sexually abused by her parents as a child. Now she uses art to deal with the trauma, writes Kathryn Smith Practising artists have certain ideas about the creative process and the potential it offers to work through ideas and experiences. Mostly personal, these experiences are filtered through a process of […]

real deal The bout between Mike Tyson and Andrew Golota could be more mayhem than Marquess of Queensbury Harry Pearson A century-and-a-half ago the great English showman Wombwell organised a fight between a pack of English mastiffs and one of the lions from his travelling menagerie. Ticket sales were brisk. On the night of the […]

Steven Friedman worm’s eye view Redistribution is not only a matter of what you do, but how you do it. Until this week, anyone who suggested that we could find a way of getting the affluent to contribute to the needs of the poor that would attract support from the government and official opposition would […]

Stuart Jeffries T he surprise winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature sat on the edge of a friend’s bed in Paris and reflected on the journey that had brought him from China to France, from the obscurity of being a playwright and novelist known only to a small number of critics and intellectuals to […]

sunday, 1.15pm I’m at my mom’s house, enjoying a traditional Cape Flats lunch: yellow rice, beetroot, sweetcorn, overcooked carrots, roast potatoes, roast chicken, roast lamb – you know, the usual. I hungrily stare at the prepared feast and momentarily experience feelings of guilt about the fact that I’m not vegetarian, thinking how devastated some of […]

If Palestinians were black, Israel would now be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States. Its development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-administered […]

ALGERIA has set out a punishing timetable for its first-ever public oil and gas exploration licensing tender but foreign firms are sceptical that sweeter terms and efficiency will reign. Algerian Energy Minister Chakib Khelil last week said six oil and gas blocks would be put on offer later this month in an international tender where […]

STEVEN SWINDELLS AND OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday SOUTH African diamond giant De Beers has ruled itself out of a bid for Canada’s Dia Met Minerals Ltd, which put itself up for sale earlier this week. De Beers had been mentioned as a likely suitor for the Canadian miner after its purchases this year of […]