Peter Robinson cricket Think of them as the rubber men: strangers from a faraway land who keep bouncing upright no matter how badly bent or twisted out of shape they might be. Oh, all right. That’s a bit over the top, but the distinguishing feature of Stephen Fleming’s New Zealand team as they trundle around […]

Chris McGreal The Nigerian government has banned a radical Yoruba organisation responsible for the murders of hundreds of people in Lagos in days of fighting between the country’s two largest ethnic groups. President Olusegun Obasanjo proscribed the widely supported Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) and ordered the arrest of its leadership and members amid another surge […]

Belinda Beresford It may be a sunny Christmas this year, but it’s unlikely to be that cheery for retailers who rely on the shopping frenzy, aided by 13th cheques, to provide a hefty chunk of their annual sales. Brooding over the shoulders of shoppers will be the South African Reserve Bank, eager to ensure that […]

Chris Dunton Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe (Oxford University Press) Novels such as Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People have been so successful worldwide they have tended to overshadow Chinua Achebe’s non-fictional works. For over 30 years, though, the Nigerian has been demonstrating he is a master essayist. His new book, […]

head Khadija Magardie Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Penuell Maduna this week threw his weight behind Constitutional Court president Arthur Chaskalson as his choice to lead a new super court. Maduna endorsed Chaskalson as the country’s top judicial officers gave the thumbs-up to a merger of the two highest courts in the land – […]

Barry Streek The Democratic Alliance (DA)hit out this week at the government’s threat to consider expropriating farmland for redistribution, charging that Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza raised the issue as a smokescreen for the local government elections. “It is a complete lie to the say there is no farmland available,” says the […]

Barry Streek The government’s ability to deliver on its local government election promise of 6E000 litres of free water to poor people every month is being questioned by the Rural Development Services Network (RDSN). RDSN has been researching the provision of 50 litres a person a day for two years. It says: “About 40E000 children […]

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 […]