axe Mungo Soggot and David Shapshak Wits University axed Ron Clarke, the palaeoanthropologist responsible for last week’s sensational fossil find in Sterkfontein, despite receiving several written pleas from eminent international scientists to keep him on. Three top fossil academics based in the United States have confirmed they attempted to persuade the university to reconsider its […]

for that `good feeling’ Peter Makurube In her neighbourhood, even a child can lead you to Margaret Singana’s home. The singer once known as Lady Africa has not been on stage in a long while, but the people of Zola still treat her with the deference of old. When disaster struck, Margaret Singana was at […]

For organised crime in Asian betting scams, read artistocratic mega-punters in English sport 250 years ago. Gambling scandals are nothing new – especially in cricket, write Kevin Mitchell and Luke Tansey Any suspicion that there is a mole in the England cricket team leaking confidential information of varying quality and relevance to an illegal bookmaker […]

An exhibition full of evocative images shows Africa as seen by African photographers, reports Alex Dodd >From its earliest days photography has been a dangerous medium. Since its inception last century, photographic images of Africa have mainly served to bolster Western perceptions of this continent as a messy tangle of jungle, starvation, exoticism, ignorance, weakness […]

Andrew Worsdale The Great Escape, a fascinating documentary airing on SABC1 at 6.30pm on Sunday December 20, tells the story of the famous Marshall Square jailbreak in 1963 where activists Arthur Goldreich, Mosie Moolla, Charlie Jasset and Harold Wolpe managed to persuade warder Johan Greef to let them out with the promise of payment. Greef […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Faisalabad | Friday 5.00pm. HEAVY fog has wiped out play for a second day in the third and final cricket Test between Pakistan and Zimbabwe Friday. The home team did not turn up at the stadium at all while the tourists left the stadium after lunch when the umpires called off the day’s […]

Harriet Lane NOTES FROM A BIG COUNTRY by Bill Bryson (Doubleday) Bill Bryson, an American who settled in North Yorkshire and wrote – affectionately and very successfully – about the vagaries of the British, appears to have moved back to the States almost by accident. Having written 77 Mail on Sunday columns about the eccentricities […]

Sean O’Brien CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson) With Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks completes a trilogy begun with the slim inter-war romance The Girl at the Lion d’Or and substantiated by the large and massively popular Great War novel Birdsong. The new novel takes us to World War II, to Vichy France, the various fractious […]

Ratanga Junction – `the first full- scale theme park in Africa’ – opened its doors to a fun-hungry public this week. Dave Chislett dared to ride the Cobra roller-coaster As one approaches the main gates to Cape Town’s Ratanga Junction the first feelings of unreality begin to set in. I mean, how many people do […]

Captain Euro Donna Block: SHARE WORLD Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a banker in blue tights. No it’s Captain Euro, defender of truth, justice and a stable European exchange rate. Armed with a currency converter and calculator-like brain, the latest costumed cutie to hit the streets of Paris, London, Milan, Cologne […]