Chris Roper As Mark Coetzee’s black and white photographs once again raise their shapely penises on either side of the acrylic painting of a South African monument that constitutes the middle panel of his Triptych, censorship once again raises its ugly little head in the middle of conservative Stellenbosch University. The last time this happened […]
Anthony Egan LAST DAYS IN CLOUD CUCKOOLAND: DISPATCHES FROM WHITE AFRICA by Graham Boynton (Jonathan Ball, R99,95) This book is hard to categorise. Its title makes it sounds like journalism; parts of it read like an attempt to understand the democratic transition in South Africa. Much of it is reminscences of a childhood in what […]
A policeman known for his fight against child abuse is found guilty of murdering the man who raped his daughter, writes Angella Johnson The story would make a powerful Hollywood script, if it had not already been done in the movie A Time to Kill: a young girl is raped by a local man who […]
Tom Quoin : Architecture We will soon have a home for our Constitutional Court. If construction proceeds as expected, it should be ready for occupation early in the year 2000. The building will stand on the upper reaches of the newly named Constitution Hill, north of the painfully memorable Fort, Johannesburg. It will overlook the […]
US Martin Kettle Organisers of marathons and long-distance road races in the United States are barring or limiting entrants from Kenya – the most frequent winners – and offering higher prizes to American competitors. The move is overtly anti-African and, in many eyes, racist. The prestigious Bolder Boulder race in Colorado has just restricted Kenyan […]
He always knew he’d have a place in film history. He’s arrogant, precious, pretentious, solipsistic and a bit of a genius. Simon Hattenstone meets Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino jives on to the stage of London’s National Film Theatre. His head nods like a hyperactive chicken. He’s walking the walk, waggling that famously big bottom, preparing […]
Alex Sudheim : On show in Durban ‘I am a visual poet,” says Deryck Healey. Trite as it may superficially sound, once immersed in his art and his nature, one realises this brief epithet is really the only one that fits. There is a quality in Healey’s work, and in his approach to making it, […]
Steve Lohr United States federal and state officials are now racing to determine what antitrust action, if any, they should take against Microsoft before its next-generation operating system, Windows 98, is shipped to personal computer makers in May and goes on sale in June. But the PC industry has been gearing up for Windows 98 […]
Janet Smith Since Ordinary People revolutionised the South African TV documentary in the early 1990s – and, indeed, the way the SABC’s current-affairs producers approached their subject after that – Mail & Guardian Television has set a standard for all other independent film-makers to follow. Its most innovative work to date, the award-winning Ghetto Diaries, […]
John Pilger cannot be accused of understating his case, either in his film or this article. Which is fine, but then he musn’t expect others to endorse his polemical views and interpretations. Hence the disclaimer. He says the old SABC sometimes ran critical documentaries by foreign TV journalists and accompanied them with disclaimers like the […]