Fashion fiend turned house hunk Jeremy Healy is the latest big name DJ to tour the country. Charl Blignaut calls him up in London on the eve of his visit Theres a measure of reassurance in that little peep that sounds just as the call connects Johannesburg to London. Multinational fingertips. A cheery Hello? crosses […]

Christopher Reed in Los Angeles The self-proclaimed shaman and best- selling author Carlos Castaneda, who pioneered the New Age movement with stories about a Mexican sorcerer called Don Juan, has died as mysteriously as he lived. His demise in the fashionable Los Angeles district of Brentwood was disclosed by the Los Angeles Times, almost two […]

Alex Dodd When celebrated American playwright August Wilson first saw Athol Fugards Sizwe Bansi is Dead way back in 1976 at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre he was blown away. I thought This is great. I wonder if I could do something like this, he says. Two Pulitzer prizes later he still cites Fugard as a […]

fossils Ellen Barlett James Kitching is really retired now, he says his days in the field are over. As he says it, he looks across the room, toward his wife. They exchange glances in the accommodating way of the long- married, then she sighs. One gets the feeling neither believes it. Moments later – talking […]

suicide Tangeni Amupadhi The bank robbery trial against Mzwakhe Mbuli got off to an inauspicious start this week when one of the officers who arrested the poet committed suicide and the probe into police actions surrounding Mbuli’s arrest continued. Prosecutor Johann Kok said this week he would not hold off until the Independent Complaints Directorate […]

The apartheid government was responsible for many disasters, but not for the Helderberg air crash, argues Robert Kirby Here’s a little paradox to tickle your logic. After carefully planning the crime, you have just shot and killed someone. Things don’t go as smoothly as you planned. As you hurry away from the scene of your […]

Christine Gordon With Angola’s peace process at breaking point, the government in Luanda is mobilising its army to block any further advances by opposition movement Unita. No direct fighting has been reported, but the government is preparing for war. Unofficial estimates put Unita’s military capacity at 30 000 armed troops, a militia of 60 000 […]

Gregory Mills French President Jacques Chirac’s visit to South Africa this week occurs at a moment of transformation in France’s relationship with Africa. It also comes at a particularly bad time for Africa, with a number of states moving in status from “transition” to “upheaval”. Just four years ago, Paris’s compulsion to remain engaged with […]

Bruno Peltier During the first press conference he has given in his own country for six years, the Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman seemed relaxed. He had quit his island retreat in the Baltic to announce that he is working on a screenplay. It is clearly a project close to his heart. Bergman, […]