Andrew Muchineripi soccer Let us get one fact straight at the outset: the absence of stars like Zinedine Zidane will not weaken the French assault on South Africa at Ellis Park come Saturday evening. No, I have not been smoking anything stronger than the tobacco my second mother, the minister of health, is trying so […]

Guilt by association chases the world’s fastest woman Duncan Mackay He is a big man and she a slender woman but somehow he always got lost in her shadow. CJ Hunter is the world shot put champion but most know him as the husband of Marion Jones. At the Olympics it was an association that […]

The new chief executive is an ordained minister with strong struggle credentials and a passion for the game Merryman Kunene For an organisation founded on the principle of maximising the value of top soccer in South Africa, the Premier Soccer League (PSL) will be pleased with its progress judging by the kind of sponsorship value […]

UK Deon Potgieter boxing It’s not often that a fighter receives a unanimous vote in South Africa as being pound-for-pound the best in the land, but ask anybody in the local fight game the question and you’re bound to get the answer: Lehlo Ledwaba. Ledwaba, the International Boxing Federation (IBF) junior-featherweight world champion, makes the […]

Neal Collins So now it’s official. Juan Antonio Samaranch closed the Games of the 27th Olympiad by telling the watching world: “These were the best Olympic Games ever. The last 16 days have been a glorious chapter in Australian history.” You can’t help but agree. Pity he couldn’t have tacked on a quick sentence about […]

Greg Bowes It’s rare that we get ace international hip-hop acts in town and when groups who incorporate these elements do visit, the reception has been less than lukewarm. Consider the plights of Anglo-Asian anarcho-noise makers Fun-Da-Mental and slick Arrested Development, who both dished out masterful, remarkable music to mediocre receptions in the Nineties. Eargasm […]

David Basckin LIFESTYLE In the eternal debate about which came first, the chicken or the egg, let me tell you, brothers and sisters, that the truth is finally known. It was the chicken. And how do we know this? Through direct observation of the real world, the only universal path to truth. It happened like […]

Everybody agrees it was the greatest Games ever – and it is unlikely to happen again Matthew Engel Like lovers forced to part, the Olympic movement and Sydney shared one long, lingering embrace on Sunday night before saying farewell. This has only been a 16- day romance, but it has been a peculiarly intense one. […]

Johnny Masilela Literary people are divided as to whether the Congress of South .African Writers (Cosaw) should be revived or not. The organisation was founded in 1987 and brought out a spate of important publications, often by young black writers, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, but faded into insignificance in recent years, amid […]

Cape Town’s hidden jazz history is coming alive due to research undertaken at the District Six Museum Helene Dancer Jazz vocalist Maxine Tyler left Cape Town’s ill-fated District Six in 1963. Before she moved, she made a recording that she never heard. Last year, on her return to Cape Town, Tyler listened to her own […]