Proposed legislation to govern minimum wages for South Africa’s lowest-paid employment sectors could pose a serious danger for employment losses, writes Haroon Bhorat The Department of Labour has recently called for public submissions and comment on the issue of minimum wages and conditions of employment for domestic and farm workers. An analysis of the first […]

Deep under the Eastern Cape’s Kat River dam are 1 000 silent witnesses to one of apartheid’s greatest lies. Peter Dickson reports Across the length and breadth of South Africa, from District Six to Dimbaza, nothing could stop prime minister BJ Vorster’s bulldozers in 1967. Not even in dusty little Seymour, off the beaten track […]

Alex Dodd For a city as untamed as Johannesburg you’d expect a little more edge on the underground. A few less galleries, more factories. Fewer townhouse complexes, more warehouses. Jo’burg’s mercurial infrastructure seems like an invitation to artists to go for the spaces between the lines and occupy territory that cannot be easily named and […]

Sex workers in Kenya have provided scientists with the tools to develop a trial vaccine against HIV. David Gough reports from Nairobi Majengo, a slum area of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is a sprawling maze of narrow alleys and paths scored by the open flow of untreated sewage. About 80 000 people live among the […]

Savage violence in East Timor and Indonesia’s stubborn refusal to accept international peacekeepers has left the United Nations facing one of its starkest dilemmas – and choices ranging from difficult to impossible. In an eerie repeat of events surrounding the Angolan elections in 1992, the UN, having organised the referendum which produced an overwhelming vote […]

Author Brian Aldiss describes his years of developing film scripts with Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick’s reputation rests not only on his films but also on his seeming isolation and determined independence. No other director has managed so successfully to stand outside the Hollywood system – and flourish. I saw an example of this independence when […]

Marianne Merten At least three civilians have applied for the post of Western Cape police commissioner -a first in the history of the police service – despite grumbling among the top brass that the job should go to one of the men in blue. The civilian candidates include Cape Town Safer City manager Omar Valley, […]

should change Barry Streek The age of consent for homosexuals should be reduced from 19 to 16, the South African Law Commission has proposed in an overhaul of the country’s sexual offence laws. The commission says because sexual intercourse in common law is restricted to the penetration of the vagina by the penis, the common […]

Melvyn MinnaarLifestyle There’s going to have to be a lot of drinking before the (real or fake) end of the millennium. That’s if we’re going to get rid of the Great White Lake of Wine which threatens to drown the hopes of our producers in the international wonderful world of wine. And then there is […]

Charles LeonardRugby There’s a coach in Cape Town who’s almost as stupid as the guy at Decca Records in London who in 1962 didn’t sign the Beatles because he didn’t see much of a future for them. This Western Province coach, responsible for the under-21 squad, told former South African Schools captain Gcobani “Bobs” Bobo […]