In his open letter to SAfm talk-show host Tim Modise (Mail & Guardian, May 28 to June 2) about the controversial issue of HIV and Aids, Donald G McNeil seems to be saying, “Don’t you worry your woolly little head, I’ll do the thinking. I’ve looked at this issue and it’s not worth debating.” McNeil’s […]
Howard Barrell Foreign policy experts are cautioning President Thabo Mbeki against committing South African forces to peacekeeping efforts in the Democratic Republic of Congo which could result in troops being bogged down there. South Africa has been coming under increasing pressure from other African countries to play a bigger role in Congo peace efforts. The […]
IN BRIEF ILLEGAL ALIENS ‘EASY ARRESTS’ POLICE figures released on Wednesday show that despite the fact that a third of all suspects arrested in Johannesburg in May were illegal aliens, only a tiny proportion of illegals were held on suspicion of committing a crime. Of the illegal immigrants held in Johannesburg, those arrested for armed […]
Universal human rights was humanity’s greatest advance during the past thousand years, writes Wole Soyinka With the blood-soaked banner of religious fanaticism billowing across the skies as one prominent legacy of this millennium, Martin Luther King’s famous theses against religious absolutism struck me early as a strong candidate for the best idea of the past […]
Evidence wa ka Ngobeni `That’s where my father’s house used to be,” says Michael Ngeno, pointing to a pile of rocks in the middle of an open field in Ventersdorp. “My parents built it in 1955, and it was a comfortable home for us. We had a school nearby, and a clinic. The soil was […]
CDs of the week Riaan Wolmarans The happening dance and rave scene is also sustaining a huge CD industry, prolifically pumping out stacks of dance albums. Mercifully we’ve left the Cover Plus days of hyped-up pop hits far behind: these days you can happily groove along to quality dance music from all the various dance […]
Nick Davies The top man at Uganda’s Finance Ministry in Kampala keeps an old greetings card in his office. It shows an employee who has just been given a miserly pay rise and has gone to his boss to show him what he thinks of “trickle down” economics. He is standing on the desk and […]
Peter Dickson Magistrates ignorant of the law are sending hundreds of farm worker families out into the cold and back to the darkest days of apartheid in the Eastern Cape. And officials of the provincial Department of Land Affairs have told land reform lobbyists that the hard-won Extension of Security of Tenure Act (Esta) is […]
Our 24-hour Internet news site, the Daily Mail & Guardian, is the largest online news publication in the country – by a substantial margin. Industry figures released this week rate DM&G twice as popular as the Financial Mail, its closest competitor in the publishing category. The Audit Bureau for Internet Statistics (Abis), part of the […]
The inauguration of Thabo Mbeki as president of South Africa this week has been characterised as the end of the Mandela era. But, while it may be a convenient description of a period of time in South African politics, the phrase is inappropriate to a larger audience which would also claim the great man as […]