Alex Dodd On show in Johannesburg He thinks it was Andy Warhol who said it. Something like, if you can’t appreciate the beauty in a Coke can what’s the point of being alive right now? “You’ve got to be able to appreciate the beauty in the world around you – just the way it is,” […]
The squatter invasion that swept Cape Town housing officials into the high court this week comes against a backdrop of delayed, scrapped or crippled low-cost housing projects around the city. Latest council figures show that nearly R30-million of the R46,2-million the city council had earmarked for priority housing projects for the year to June 1998 […]
Simon Caulkin reports on the bright young masters of the Web universe This year $20-billion of business will be done on the Internet. That’s about the size of the economy of Vietnam or Iraq, and three times the figure for economic commerce, or e-commerce, last year. By 2000 the total may be five or even […]
Wally Mbhele Despite the succession of adventurous military operations he has been associated with, Aboobaker Ismail is an intensely private person – so private that he is still more commonly known by his nom de guerre, Rasheed. It was during his tenure as an Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) commander that he became one of the previous […]
Andy Capostagno John Robbie is fond of saying, “There are only two kinds of people in the world. The Irish and people who wish they were Irish”. I found myself pondering those words while watching Catriona McKiernan burst from the pack, chase the leaders, reel them in and finally trot home in glorious isolation to […]
The Wild Coast SDI is setting local communities against each other, report Thembela Kepe, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ben Cousins Simmering beneath the surface of the Wild Coast Spatial Development Initiative (SDI), announced with great fanfare last month, are conflicts and tensions that could blow the much- vaunted investment initiative sky high. In some areas a […]
Stefaans Brmmer Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga shares a business empire with an apartheid-era military intelligence agent who was also a key backer in Motshekga’s bitterly contested campaign last year for the provincial throne. Abel Rudman’s military intelligence cover was blown in 1991 when the then Weekly Mail revealed that an anti-African National Congress newspaper he […]
Mungo Soggot and Andy Duffy A number of policemen charged with torturing suspects in custody – in some cases with electric shocks – have not been suspended while awaiting trial. The Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) – the police watchdog which has received 63 complaints of police torture over the past year – has confirmed to […]
Is it true that the only feasible agenda in politics today is a right-wing agenda? Twenty years ago, the question would have been ridiculous. Every liberal democracy courted a left agenda, in the government or in the mainstream opposition. To be on the left meant, at a minimum, embracing three commitments which those on the […]
David Beresford The master planner in the African National Congress’s liberation war came out from the shadows this week to defend his role in the most deadly phase of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Aboobaker Ismail, the ANC’s head of “special operations”, appeared before Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ask for amnesty for a […]