Cedric Mayson Spirit Level Myths fool thousands and religious myths fool millions. The old apartheid myths of the communist onslaught with reds under the beds and black cut-throats in the ikhaya are dead, but there are plenty of others around. Most countries acclaim democracy as a good method of achieving a government which represents the […]
Haidar Eid THE END OF THE ‘PEACE PROCESS’: OSLO AND AFTER by Edward Said (Pantheon) The difficulty, albeit necessity, of addressing the current situation in Palestine emanates from the euphoria of the mainstream media accompanying the signing of the Oslo Accords in 199. The mainstream media avoided the agreement’s denial of Palestinian rights, endorsing the […]
Philippa Garson class struggle It would appear that the battle for the soul of the country’s curriculum is far from over. When Minister of Education Kader Asmal took the decision to subject the African National Congress’s flagship education policy, Curriculum 2005, to independent scrutiny in February this year by appointing a review committee to look […]
The decision to award the third cellular licence to Cell C was supported by only three councillors Ivor Powell A week after the government’s announcement that South Africa’s third cellular telephone licence is to be given to the Saudi-backed Cell C consortium, the award seems as shaky and compromised as ever. A cluster of new […]
active Marianne Merten Ten grade 11 and 12 pupils crowd into a cold classroom at Langa High School, in a Cape Town township, on an overcast afternoon to attend extra science tutorials held by University of Cape Town students as part of the ActivScience project. Thirty UCT BSc students visit four township high schools Mondays […]
Howard Barrell over a barrel By a stroke of good fortune, a conference on opposition in South Africa that had been planned for many months opened last week just four days after the formation of the Democratic Alliance (DA). It also coincided with Robert Mugabe’s attempts to digest the outcome of Zimbabwe’s general election. About […]
Taban lo Liyong In the February 4 issue of the science journal Nature it is reported that HIV probably originated from chimpanzees and that the virus was transferred from these primates to humans. Chimpanzees in Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea are supposedly the culprits. But if HIV originated from chimpanzees, how was it transferred to […]
Mail & Guardian reporters Breaking the silence surrounding the realities of Aids is the theme of Aids 2000, the international Aids conference to be held in Durban this week. But it is likely that Aids 2000 will be remembered more for the “Durban declaration”: a document signed by 5E000 people testifying in their belief that […]
Terry Kurgan This project, though in every sense a development from Family Affairs (the work for which I was selected), doesn’t use my own photographs or my own children at all. I am using found family snapshots. Mostly from the Sixties – and all in colour. They could belong to anybody. And I am printing […]
photographs Evidence wa ka Ngobeni The Aids 2000 conference committee has banned photographs by an award-winning Dutch photographer on the grounds that the images provide an excessively graphic insight into the dreadfulness of the HIV/Aids epidemic. The photographer, Geert van Kesteren, from Holland, submitted an application early this year to the committee to exhibit his […]