Howard Barrell : OVER A BARREL Why believe economists or economic explanations? For economics takes creativity, greed, mood swings and fortune- telling, and pretends to combine them into a science. If, in this world, some things do indeed cause other things to happen, it is unusually difficult to say in the case of economics what […]

Wally Mbhele and Ferial Haffajee Jay Naidoo’s future as Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting hangs in the balance as tensions with his department’s officials have reached the deputy president’s office. With elections looming, the jockeying for Cabinet posts has begun and Naidoo could be an early casualty. There is a persistent rumour that Free […]

Neil Manthorp in Wellington Cricket It would be pretty funny if New Zealand won the third Test, don’t you think? Unlike the Rocky scripts that have the battered, bloodied hero dragging himself off his knees and onward to last-gasp, savage victory, this plot would have a dribbly- nosed, 50kg bookworm slapping the bully into submission […]

INDABA, MY CHILDREN by Credo Mutwa (Payback Press) Payback Press, part of Scottish publisher Canongate, is devoted to new and old works by important black writers. Among the titles already published under this imprint is Chester Himes’s Harlem cycle of murder mysteries; two famous books on black music, Leroi Jones’s Blues People and Ben Sidran’s […]

won’t bore He’s a man of contradictions – style and good manners coexisting with arrogance and a talent to annoy. He’s romantically attached to the land of his birth, yet remains one of its fiercest critics. Roy Hattersley on the Unquiet American Gore Vidal is the most elegant, erudite and eclectic writer of his generation […]

Matthew Krouse : Down the tube You don’t have to be as deep as Mike Lipkin to know that people spend a lot of their weekends in bed, in front of the television – particularly the early mornings, when those with kids probably get the worst end of a cute, co-parenting romp. If you have […]

Alex Dodd A wave of dissent has been rising this week in response to implications that Tim Modise’s appointment as SAfm’s prime time morning talk show host has been tokenistic. The news that Modise would be taking over from Will Bernard, host of Talk at Will, broke last week. At the time, even Bernard took […]

Ferial Haffajee : TAKING STOCK >From the Top of Africa we look down on one of the continent’s largest cities. Johannesburg. At the top of the Carlton Centre (now called the Top of Africa), the city looks like a mini-land. Cars rush about on highways that criss-cross the city linking Sandton in the north with […]

THE government will deploy three “mobile forces” in volatile KwaZulu-Natal to snuff out political violence threatening the June 2 elections. Police Divisional Commissioner Andre Pruis said on Thursday that forces combining police, soldiers and intelligence operatives will be deployed from April 1. Pruis, who declined to state the size of what he described as “mobile […]

Mail & Guardian reporter The probability of senior African National Congress leaders testifying in mitigation of sentence for Allan Boesak next Tuesday are slim. When Boesak was accused of stealing from foreign donors and flew back to South Africa to stand trial, thousands of supporters turned out at the airport to cheer him. Minister of […]