Time contains every paradox. It heals all wounds, but it wounds all heels. It shrinks, it stretches, it flies, it drags. It varies relativistically according to the speed of the observer. It is measured in years, but even years have to be subdivided into tropical years, or anomalistic years, or Great Years. Aeons are counted […]

Ivor Powell Nosizwe Madlala-Routledge, the newly appointed deputy minister of defence, is no militaristic hawk or securocrat. She’s a self-professed pacifist – and a practising member of the Society of Friends or Quaker movement. She is married to Jeremy Routledge, the director of the Quaker Peace Centre in Cape Town. In the 1980s the centre […]

Matthew Krouse, who once portrayed Dimitri Tsafendas in a play, looks at Lisa Key’s extraordinary documentary on the man who murdered Verwoerd I know what it feels like to kill Hendrik Verwoerd. I killed him often in 1985, when I acted as Dimitri Tsafendas in a musical satire I wrote with Robert Colman, who played […]

Once again American actors are starring in a film adaption of a South African play, but Danny Glover used his fame to further the anti-apartheid cause – and he’s a bankable star, writes John Matshikiza Art is about the suspension of belief -or, in a latter-day sophistication of this theme, the suspension of disbelief. You […]

Mungo Soggot ASecond Look A few weeks before the election, a foreign diplomat said that as far as his government was concerned, the litmus test of the Thabo Mbeki era was going to be what happened to the then Cabinet’s non-performers. The diplomat mentioned only two names – Penuell Maduna, whom he believed had had […]

Angela Neustatter Body Language Mid-life isn’t what it used to be. The days when women of a certain age were expected to fade into the wallpaper, wearing beige crimplene and accepting they had reached their sell-by date, are no more than a memory. And what has caused this disruption of the definition of mid-life? The […]

Mercedes Sayagues Unita’s artillery rumbled 5km away. Malanje was surrounded. Panic ensued. The airport was swept by people desperate to get on a relief plane bound for Luanda. The Antonov had little safe time for take- off. Manuel’s mother lifted him over her head. A hand pulled him up on board. While his mother scrambled […]

CHARLES MANGWIRO, Maputo | Friday 2.45pm. REGIONAL governments must begin involving rural communities in the management of natural resources if they wish to avoid cross-border water conflicts, European and African resource managers said in Maputo on Friday. The managers told delegates from nine southern African countries that water remained the region’s scarcest and most desirable […]

Community management of natural resources is all the rage among conservationists. But is it really working, asks Saliem Fakir To promote the sustainable use of natural resources and to maximise benefits for rural communities, several community-based natural resource management projects have been initiated in South Africa, mainly by foreign donor agencies. These projects aim to […]

Marianne Merten Deputy justice minister Cheryl Gillwald was job-hunting when she heard the news of her appointment. She now laughs about it. When Gillwald realised she was not on the party list for re-election to Parliament she sent out her curriculum vitae. “I started job- hunting. I did quite a lot of hunting – I […]