Q & A Manaka Ranaka is the latest addition to the cast of Isidingo (SABC3, Monday to Thursday at 18.30pm). The blond, dreadlocked 20-year-old plays Nandipha, a streetwise maid for Derek Nyathi. In the few months since arriving at Horizon Deep, she has crossed paths with the town’s crook, George Zamdela, and wreaked havoc with […]

A travelling exhibition focuses on history’s silent witnesses, writes Alex Sudheim The crowd: that swollen, seething animal, comes to life when human beings swarm together in a single unity of desire. As an organism the crowd works its seduction by promising the surrender of individual will to the mass. Individuals, no longer responsible for their […]

Howard Barrell and Barry Streek While the government has scorned talk of an economic “big bang” and sought to dampen expectations this week, statements by President Thabo Mbeki and his Cabinet colleagues reveal that they are initiating far-reaching changes designed to propel the economy to a higher growth path. Mbeki’s State of the Nation address […]

Channel vision Last Sunday’s Newsmaker interview with Mr Thabo Mbeki should be released on video as a teaching aid, for use in first-year state-of-the-art political sycophancy lectures. Marketed overseas it could become an academic gotta-have. If ever there was a demonstration of how callow and smarmy it is possible to become, this was it. Snuki […]

John Cassy Sex has been overtaken by music as the most popular search request on the Internet. MP3, the technology that allows music to be downloaded direct from the Net, has knocked sex off the number one spot as the word or phrase most commonly entered into search engines. The rankings are from Searchterms.com, which […]

Michael Finch Hockey Claire Digby, the president of South Africa hockey, had a tough job this week. While delighted with the decision by the National Olympic Committee of South Africa (Nocsa) to include the women’s hockey side in the Olympic team, Digby also had to inform the men’s team that they would not be going […]

Steven Friedman WORM’S EYE VIEW Our politics now is a little like a Hollywood western; if you want to be taken seriously, you have to talk tough. The most obvious examples are Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete and his colleague in education, Kader Asmal. Tshwete is given to denouncing criminals and human rights […]

David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY One day, no doubt, my grandson will ask me: “Where were you when Nelson Mandela was released?” I will reply: “I was there, my boy! I was there.” And he will say: “Don’t cry, grandpa. He did live an awfully long time!” “It’s not that,” I will say, irritably brushing away […]

Paul Kirk The owner of The Ranch this week claimed that top policemen had frequented his establishment for free sex before last week’s raid on Johannesburg’s premier high- class brothel. The Ranch’s owner, Andrew Phillips, who has been released on R10E000 bail, said that in addition to using the facilities for free, senior officers struck […]

Steven Poole MUSIC AND SILENCE by Rose Tremain (Chatto &Windus) Music and silence, as Rose Tremain knows, are not necessarily opposites. They inhabit each other. Silence is given meaning by the music built around it. And much of the meaning of music resides in the unique character of silence that it engenders at its end. […]