Max du Preez has never been in therapy, but he’s on the box again with a new current affairs programme. Alex Dodd reports `I’ve never seriously considered therapy,” says Max du Preez, who has spent his last two years making damn sure that the public got to see exactly what went on at the truth […]
interdict’ Ferial Haffajee All that Thembi Zikhali needed to enforce her interdict was proof that it existed. Because it is a court order, police are compelled to enforce it. “Police have no discretion,” says lawyer Joanne Fedler of the legal advocacy trust, Tshwaranang. The domestic violence Bill, a watershed piece of draft legislation, could curb […]
Alex Duval Smith Some things change – Zaire is now the Democratic Republic of Congo – but despots just change their spots. President Laurent-Dsir Kabila, hailed as heading a new breed of African leaders, increasingly looks like Mobutu Sese Seko, minus the leopard-skin hat. On May 17 1997, thousands of people welcomed Kabila’s victorious rebel […]
Ken Barris THE IBIS TAPESTRY by Mike Nicol (Knopf) The cover blurb describes The Ibis Tapestry as “a thriller with all the searing immediacy of today’s headlines”. An understandable bit of commercial fantasy perhaps, but wildly inaccurate, and unjust to a book that should be taken seriously on its own terms: as a referential maze […]
Linking bourses from all over the world could cause a financial crash worse than ever before, warn Alex Brummer and Jill Treanor The next stock market crash could be so sudden and so devastating that it would dwarf those of October 1929 and 1987, and all the policy makers and regulators in the world will […]
Iden Wetherell An understanding of diplomacy, it would seem, is not a requirement for South Africa’s diplomats serving abroad. One based in Harare has made such a nuisance of himself, he faces the rare penalty of being sent home for good. Jabu Buthelezi is, in fact, an employee of the Department of Home Affairs. But […]
The two most senior African National Congress officials in the Free State have been shunned by their supporters on the eve of the party’s preparations to elect new provincial leadership. ANC Premier Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri and the provincial chair, Zingile Dingale, appear to be facing the chop. None of the 10 Free State ANC regional branches […]
Suzanne Wilton and Sasha Nagy Canadian fugitive Patrick Steven Ryan’s ties to extreme right-wing groups in South Africa have become part of a Calgary police investigation into his role in the violent armed robbery of an armoured car last March. Ryan, whose connections to white- supremacist groups are also part of the investigation, visited South […]
Paul Theroux often makes enemies of those he writes about. Now he has written about VSNaipaul, once his close friend. Tim Adams reports Paul Theroux has had more than one existence. “You have as many lives as you want,” he says. “But you have to take them. You have to be up to it. The […]
Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon I must confess to feeling a bit ambivalent about Dr Nkosazana Zuma’s latest anti- smoking crusade. As a three-years-on ex-puffer, my wife assures me I have all but emptied my well of self- righteous reformist zeal. I now tend to let people get on with their tobacco undisturbed by pious sermonettes […]