Howard Barrell OVER A BARREL Looking to a bureaucrat to stimulate entrepreneurial activity is rather like asking a journalist to forget his or her sense of superficiality. It is about as well-directed an expectation as striking to persuade your employer to create more jobs, or calling on millions to hate capitalism in order to attract […]
Barry Streek If the fight against rural poverty is to be won, the government has to ensure a “national lifeline tariff” of 50 litres of clean water a person a day, the Rural Development Services Network (RDSN) said this week. Its research has shown that about 40% to 60% of rural people do not have […]
Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH The speed and efficiency with which Britain has deployed forces to evacuate its beleaguered citizens from Sierra Leone has been admirable. But to many Africans the British action raises a very worrying question: why didn’t Britain place its forces at the disposal of the United Nations, so that everyone […]
Brenda Atkinson When someone whom you love, and who is close to you, is raped, your heart’s selfish poems become so much emotional litter. The way your heart feels the world is as if it had never really beaten before this moment, when the phone rings, and the voice breaks: she was raped. She is […]
Michael Vlismas GOLF Harvey Penick, the legendary golf teacher, once said: “No pretty woman can miss a single shot without a man giving her some poor advice.” It is for this reason that a certain golf correspondent kept his mouth shut while watching Joanne Norton practice her putting earlier this year. Norton was struggling to […]
David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY A dreadful weekend, spent worrying over whether President Thabo Mbeki is a fool. One is used to describing politicians as fools, just as the referee is always blind – at least until he or she sees things the same way as oneself. But just as one does not expect to see […]
Guy Willoughby ‘Herman Charles Bosman died in 1951. Why revisit him now? Simple; we need to look to the past, the pre-apartheid past, to know the way forward. Apartheid so pervaded our consciousness that it’s immediately dated itself. All the writing of that period is exactly that – period stuff now …” David Butler, one-man […]
Marianne Merten ‘Traditions of Tomorrow” is the theme of a three-week textile workshop in Cape Town for artists from across Africa, held by internationally renowned contemporary textile artist Sheila Hicks. “We know all the obvious iconography representing Africa. Guess what? We are going to blow your mind with new visions and these new visions come […]
Trekking up a mountain and cherry-picking in season are only two of the many things to do in the ‘mini-Serengeti’ Jean Spear ‘There’s Chester Williams and Brendan Paulse of our springbok herd,” points Willie Nel, owner of Moolmanshoek, a luxury new guesthouse and adventure farm in the Eastern Free State. Nel has affectionately given the […]
Neil Manthorp Whatever else may be said about the King inquiry, the notion that South Africa’s cricketers will somehow attempt, let alone be successful in masking the truth would appear to be absolute rubbish. Not only are the national squad players prepared and willing to testify, they are, for the most part, looking forward to […]