Jean Spear SOUTH AFRICA LESOTHO & SWAZILAND: THE ROUGH GUIDE by Barbra McCrea, Greg Mthembu-Salter, Tony Pinchuck & Donald Reid (Rough Guides) Newly published, South Africa Lesotho & Swaziland: The Rough Guide provides a street-savvy, balanced guide to the southern tip of Africa. The guide offers in-depth, to-the-point coverage of everything from boerewors to skelms […]

State More than half-a-million rand has failed to find its way to the country’s controlling body of professional golf Michael Vlismas GOLF The Southern Africa Tour instituted court action against the Free State’s provincial government this week in an attempt to recover more than half-a- million rand it believes it is owed. Somewhere between Cape […]

Hazel Southam In a British survey last year, almost one million children claimed to have been “upset” by something they had found on the Internet. Forty per cent said that they had found something “rude”. Another poll showed that 56% of British Internet users are concerned about pornography and 75% will not let their children […]

Donna Block The co-founder of New Africa Investments Limited (Nail), Jonty Sandler, tried to claw his way back from the business wilderness this week, appealing to shareholders in full-page advertisements to block Nail’s long-awaited restructuring. The disgraced former executive resigned his post last year after it emerged that Sandler and three other directors had hatched […]

Fifty years ago, the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was newly wed … and dying. DJTaylor traces George Orwell’s final weeks In January 1950, a small procession of visitors could be seen each afternoon making their way singly and severally through the cheerless north Bloomsbury squares towards University College Hospital (UCH). Many of […]

Mark Milner It was in use before a written language was invented. Today it is being studied as a possible means of staving off ailments ranging from bowel cancer to gallstones. It has been used to provide heating and lighting for centuries. Even the trendiest of today’s celebrity chefs does not disdain to slosh it […]

Barry Streek Sport, welfare, arts, culture and environmental sectors, represented by NGOs, have launched an umbrella body, the Peoples’ National Lottery Coalition (PNLC), to monitor the allocation of the proceeds from South Africa’s national lottery, which is due to be launched on March 1. The PNLC intends to engage with the government “in a proposed […]

David Martin OBITUARY:IANCHRISTIE In the days before it was fashionable to have a local accent, Ian Christie’s Scottish brogue would have been a barrier to his working as a radio commentator. Such was the reaction of Mozambique’s late president, Samora Machel, when Christie broadcast for the first time from Maputo in the 1970s for the […]

invisible’ Pityana Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Rhoda Kadalie, the former Human Rights Commissioner, this week took another swing at the Human Rights Commission (HRC) chair, Barney Pityana, for remaining aloof in Switzerland while the furore raged over the subpoenas to the country’s editors. Kadalie, who last week called on editors to defy the subpoenas served […]

This was not the week to be jobless, poor and a sinner. In the moral schema that underlay Minister of Fiance Trevor Manuel’s budget, little charity was on offer for this category among us. It was those of us in work who got the tax breaks, the rich can afford to pay cunning accountants to […]