Bob Mattes compares how the parties have fared since the last Opinion ’99 survey The effectiveness of the political parties’ final four weeks of electioneering can be tested through a comparison of results from the April Opinion ’99 survey (the last opinion poll carried out before the election) with emerging election results. Assuming a turnout […]

Racist and sexist in-jokes disguised as South African flavour were the big winners at this year’s Loerie awards, writes Brenda Atkinson Despite being 21 years old and the last Loerie event of the millennium, this year’s awards were, notwithstanding technological upgrades, a mediocre rite of passage indeed. The tone for a retrogressively racist and sexist […]

Aids myths? Myths, quasi-myths and questions about Aids abound. Donald McNeil Jnr attempts to demystify the epidemic in Southern Africa Donald G McNeil Jnr Despite its size, South Africa is number one in the world in several fields: rugby, cricket, tuberculosis and Aids. One hears too little about the last two. In 1990, a New […]

According to a recent study, the rape homicide rate in Cape Town is 12 times higher than in the United States. Charlene Smith reports In the photograph is a beautiful young woman sitting with her boyfriend. It is a 21st-birthday photograph. Six years before she was raped so violently with a sharp object in her […]

The winner of the Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammet award is not a standard academic, reports Mercedes Sayagues Judged on her writings alone, Dr Patricia McFadden appears to be an African Valkyrie in metal breast-plates, who sees the world through rigid prisms of gender and race. But when you meet her, she is a warm woman with […]

John Matshikiza With the Lid Off Response to the saga of my looted home has been huge. Many people have recounted similar misfortunes; most have been amused and appalled at the same time (it is like being in the middle of a horror movie, where the extremity of the situation makes you burst out into […]

You write a novel, the proof copies get passed around, panic sets in. Will they like it? Is it well enough written? Did I do justice to the characters? You wait to hear the cut and thrust of intellectual argument spearing down your literary faults. But no, what I got instead was quiet corner confessions […]

In The Prophet, Brett Bailey boldly takes on one the most enigmatic figures in Xhosa history, writes John Matshikiza Six weeks before the play was due to premier at Grahamstown, Brett Bailey had his laptop computer stolen from his makeshift office in Port St Johns, where he was rehearsing with his group, Third World Bunfight. […]

South Africa’s second democratic election saw the virtual extinction of the party that invented apartheid, writes Howard Barrell The African National Congress scored an emphatic victory at the polls this week, soaring beyond the two-thirds majority threshold in an election widely acclaimed by international observers. And in one of the most remarkable recoveries in modern […]