Woodstock Riaan Wolmarans Unlike the famous event it is named after, there will be no mud at Woodstock. There also won’t be kwaito or jazz, despite it being billed as “the only known South African festival that incorporates all angles of pop culture”. That aside, the Woodstock Pop Culture Experience will this year present four […]

The host city braces itself against high winds and the tyranny of the sponsors Grant Shimmin in Sydney One of Sydney’s more popular radio stations is running a promotion that starts: “Spring in Sydney is easy; cool nights, clear sunny days, soft city breezes.” Well, I suppose two out of three ain’t bad, because they […]

Nawaal Deane, Jaspreet Kindra and Belinda Beresford The Mail & Guardian this week asked all Cabinet ministers whether they were working on the assumption that HIV causes Aids. On Tuesday Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who had been one of 13 female foreign ministers who signed a letter to the United Nations Secretary General, […]

The Mail & Guardian’s Cape and Durban correspondents, Marianne Merten and Paul Kirk, were runners-up in the 2000 Ruth First Courageous Journalism Awards, announced this week by Rhodes University. The winner was The Star’s Lynne Altenroxel. Charlene Smith won the prize last year for her articles on rape in the M&G, news editor Mungo Soggot […]

independence While welcoming certain aspects of a draft legal Bill, law groups point out that it has crucial flaws Khadija Magardie The legal profession and the government are on a collision course over a plan to launch a regulatory body whose effective control will be vested in the minister of justice. The draft Legal Practice […]

Stephen Gray When, in 1914, Henry Rider Haggard inspected Pietermaritzburg’s newly opened Voor-trekker Museum, including the Church of the Vow and so on, he recorded in his diary that it was suitably packed with interesting mementoes of none but the “old Dutch”. Nowadays its ambit is hardly as exclusive, as I visited it for one […]

Khadija Magardie A controversial column by leading political scientist Steven Friedman has been axed from South Africa’s only Jewish newspaper with the approval of the country’s chief rabbi. The column, The Other View, appeared fortnightly in the South African Jewish Report until Friedman’s unorthodox views became too much of a “kvetsh” (bothersome or needling, in […]

Merryman Kunene soccer Barcelona might pride themselves on being the only major club in the world without a shirt sponsor, but for most teams those words on their chests mean vital money in the bank. But what teams wear – or don’t wear – on the front of their shirts is a thorny issue, as […]

By concentrating on quality the Film Resource Unit has broken away from the distribution greed factor Andrew Worsdale The fastest growing distribution concern in Southern Africa is the Film Resource Unit (FRU), which started less than 10 years ago as a project run by activists with a television, a VCR, a room and some plastic […]