Aspasia Karras While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same. Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites. Local government is […]

Marion Edmunds An Israeli conman, posing as a devout Orthodox Jew, has duped Cape Town-based entrepreneurs into investing millions of rands in a fraudulent investment scheme and skipped the country. The SAPS’s Commercial Branch is investigating Shmuel Deri (29), who is alleged to have left about 65 investors, many from Sea Point and Clifton, out […]

A medical programme to eradicate river blindness enters its second decade with great results, writes Anthony Gilbert For centuries, a debilitating, disfiguring and often blinding disease called river blindness (onchocerciasis) has plagued people who live in tropical regions. The disease is endemic in 35 countries, primarily in parts of Central and West Africa and limited […]

Jos Havermans Despite the turmoil in the world’s stock markets, it seems almost every country in the world — even the poorest — wants to have its own stock exchange. And Malawi, one of the world’s 15 least developed countries, is no exception. After a three-year apprenticeship period, the Malawi Stock Exchange is poised to […]

Janine Stephen ‘I tell you what,” said local resident Jean George in a hushed tone, “that American lady was half bare.” Nominated for the 1997 Adult Video awards’ Best Group Sex Scene and Best Female Performer of the Year, United States porn star Christi Lake brought reporters flocking to Parow Industria on the dusty outskirts […]

Journalists frequently fall into the trap of writing too much about their own profession. It is, therefore, with some reluctance that we return to the subject, specifically by drawing attention to a column written in the latest edition of the Financial Mail by Joe Thloloe, headed “Motshekga and the media” — referring to the Mail […]

curious tale of three schools Bengu’s school falls on hard times Andy Duffy The school Minister of Education Sibusiso Bengu established and ran before he went into politics has been hit by funding cuts, forcing it to close its doors to hundreds of schoolchildren. The KwaZulu-Natal provincial education department has told Dlangezwa High School that […]

Ferial Haffajee South African advertising agencies are hot- footing it into the rest of Africa, often learning as much as they are teaching. Local agencies have partners in agencies in most African countries. Eastern and southern Africa is covered best, although some agencies work in west and north Africa, as well as Mauritius. South Africa’s […]

Just the suggestion of producing an Afrikaans film with an all-white cast in South Africa in 1998 is enough to make a boardroom of grown businessmen burst into uncontollable laughter. “Nee hartjie,” said the men in suits to film-maker Katinka Heyns when she was doing the circuit to find financial backers for her latest project, […]

Brenda Atkinson wonders whether Kendell Geers’s recent show was a success. Was it a punchline without a joke? An olive without a Martini? A vetkoek without filling? Was it an ingeniously constructed art event, an accurate barometer of cultural neurosis, or a distorted painting of political intervention gone horribly wrong? It was an exhibition by […]