The applications of biotechnology have provoked debate about its ethics. Richard Holloway looks at some of the issues One way to classify people is by the tumbler test: pessimists say it is half empty, optimists half full. In most of the great debates about human nature people place themselves somewhere on the continuum between these […]

Iden Wetherell Zimbabweans are this week treating what is officially a win for President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in the general election as a triumph for the opposition. Zanu-PF retained power by hanging on to 62 of the 120 elected seats in last weekend’s poll. But it lost 57 seats to the Movement for Democratic […]

Kelwyn Sole SONG TRIALS by Mxolisi Nyezwa (Gecko) For a number of years now, Mxolisi Nyezwa’s poems have appeared in local and international journals, as well as forming part of the 1992 collection Essential Things. In addition, he is editor of one of the most innovative literary journals published at the moment, Kotaz. Nyezwa is […]

Howard Barrell The new opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is likely to win at least one out of every five town council seats in the forthcoming local government elections. It has a realistic chance of taking control of Cape Town and, if the African National Congress has difficulty in getting its vote to the […]

Guy Willoughby describes putting together his new play about Olive Schreiner’s forgotten brother Will ‘The only duty we owe to history”, declared Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.” Eighteen months ago, a National Arts Council grant in hand, I set out to do just that – or at least to refashion the historical record about […]

Four farm labourers claimed at the hearing that they were sacked for joining unions, unproven theft and protesting against being assaulted.

Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH If your electoral commission was like the one in my country, Ghana, which consistently ignores opposition demands on registration of voters, the reopening of electoral registers, and also rejects indeed any other request that the ruling party does not endorse, you would appreciate what President Robert Mugabe and his […]

Robyn Alexander THIRTEEN CENTS by K Sello Duiker (Ink Inc) SKYLINE by Patricia Schonstein Pinnock (David Philip) Each of these intriguing first novels opens so as to immediately absorb the reader into its first-person narrator’s world. K Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents begins with 12-year-old Azure’s introduction of himself – “Ah-zoo-ray. That’s how you say it.” […]

Thebe Mabanga The man who has been central to the process of compiling and selling the 2006 World Cup soccer bid is a publicity-shy divorcee who would rather get on with a behind-the-scenes role than become the operational face and voice of South Africa’s bid. Danny Jordan, the CEO of the country’s World Cup bid […]

Africa’s bid to host the World Cup for the first time is undermined by the Confederation of African Football’s refusal to choose either South Africa or Morocco as the better candidate Connie Selebogo, Nawaal Deane, Merryman Kunene, Thebe Mabanga and Jubie Matlou When the Federation of International Football Association gets to vote for the host […]