Wonder Hlongwa It was handing over my autobank card and pin number that convinced me my visit to a loan shark was not going to be pleasant. A friend had told me that loan sharks were the quickest moneylenders in the city. The sign at the one in Braamfontein certainly seemed to back this up: […]

Paul Farrely: SHARE WORLD The irony is delicious. The despair in markets the world over has just made Wall Street’s biggest optimist very, very rich indeed. Last week, Abby Joseph Cohen, cool- headed chief investment strategist at Goldman Sachs and the United States’s most influential market guru, finally claimed one of the biggest prizes on […]

Alex Duval Smith in Lagos Never mind the military regime’s promises of free elections. Never mind the international community’s endorsement. What 100-million Nigerians want to know is: what would Fela Kuti have said? The hard-living, outspoken inventor of afrobeat, who died last year and would have been 60 this Thursday, left behind both a musical […]

Gail Smith With everyone clamouring for the attention and income of the youth market (the black is silent), The Kwaito Storm is an event-in-waiting. Set to take place on Saturday night, October 31, at Johannesburg’s Electric Workshop, it promises to bring together some of the hippest, most happening of the blackoisie, kwaito’s latest and greatest, […]

South Africa supports the aims of Jubilee 2000, but it seems we don’t qualify for debt relief. Ann Eveleth reports Each year the South African government spends as much money paying interest on its R338-billion debt as it does on education, but the Department of Finance insists there is no easy way out. Jubilee 2000 […]

Maureen Barnes Down the tube Of all the irritating things about SABC TV, I think the one which bothers me the most is its inflexibility – a hangover, like so many aspects of the present service, from the previous policy-makers. SABC3 decided – and please don’t think I’m knocking this decision – that on Saturday […]

as a 23-year-old French man A 13-year-old boy goes missing in San Antonio, Texas. Three years later, he is found, alive, in Spain, with an appalling tale of kidnap and a paedophile ring. His family is overjoyed to have him home safe. But things are not quite as they seem. Nick Davies reports Just more […]

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s prison comrades have been freed. But they are still struggling to come to terms with the horror of ordeal, reports Alex Duval Smith Aa ke, Aa ke Pya Ogoni aa ke Iilee yira na ko Yoo-ue a zia-i Arise, arise, Ogoni people arise We shall no longer allow people to cheat us – […]

Justin Arenstein Mpumalanga’s government battened down the hatches this week and refused to release any information about its dealings with a shadowy business network reported to be channelling funds into the African National Congress’s 1999 election coffers. The network was reportedly set up in 1996 under the control of three holding companies and relied heavily […]

Shirley Kossick OKAVANGO GODS by Anthony Fleischer (David Philip) CHILDISH THINGS by Marita van der Vyver, translated by Madeleine van Biljon (Penguin) In Okavango Gods, Anthony Fleischer tells the story of Pula Barotse, a Hambukushu youth who straddles the divide between Western modernity and the ancient beliefs and myths of his own “people of the […]