Sifiso Maseko The festival circuit The word going around is that theatre is dead. What has really died, however, is protest theatre. But while stage practitioners seem to lack direction and the ability to formulate a contemporary enthusiasm that was heightened in protest theatre, all is not lost. The good news is that street theatre, […]

Marion Edmunds The South African government is seeking to play down a report by Amnesty International linking South African arms sales to recent bloodshed in Rwanda. The office of Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Kader Asmal, which oversees South Africa?s international arms trade, questioned Amnesty International?s findings that South Africa was Rwanda?s largest arms […]

In a country where 65% of the population is illiterate, verbal evidence is now accepted as proof of ownership. Mercedes Sayagues reports Mozambiques new land Bill, approved by Parliament in July, amounts to a massive victory for ordinary peasants and contains a landmark provision that makes it unique among land legislation in Southern Africa. The […]

The World Bank sets its sights on alleviating poverty as a rising Asia challenges the United States hegemony, writes Ben Turok What might have been a rather soporific jamboree of 14000 finance ministers, officials and bankers in Hong Kong last week was brought alive by a rude and abrasive exchange between the Premier of Malaysia, […]

Wally Mbhele Deputy minister and African National Congress firebrand Peter Mokaba has stirred up a hornets nest by questioning whether South African Communist Party (SACP) members should remain members of the ANC. Querying whether the present form of the tripartite alliance holds any benefits for the movement, he has taken on one of the liberation […]

under a mango tree Miranda Sawyer World music is defined as All Contemporary Popular Music that Comes from Anywhere Outside Europe or North America Except Jamaica, and for that reason it isnt about to hit the mainstream. This isnt because its useless, or difficult, or because philistine Western taste cant cope with anyone who sings […]

Andy Duffy The Northern Province is planning to pull the plug on a R240-million school building programme, claiming the cash is needed to pay its education wage bill. The province has decided that its R4- billion education budget, though the largest provincial education allocation, is still R400-million short of its needs and that the school-building […]

Robert Kirby : Loose cannon Nat Hentoff was, of course, absolutely right when he said that censorship has become one of mankinds prime instincts. Tampering with the minds of other people has become as essential to the survival of the human species as self-preservation and all the rest of them. Censorship is a branch of […]

Glynis OHara The Kora Awards ceremony first arrived on our doorstep in a somewhat mysterious fashion last year. Nobody seemed at all clear how the awards were constructed, who chose the winners, what the criteria were, and why everyone was sitting in the Standard Bank Arena watching musicians from Africa perform and walk off with […]

Swapna Prabhakaran Pregnant women undergoing controversial Aids drug trials at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital are fully aware that they stand a one-in-four chance of receiving a placebo. Despite this, the women this week gave their full support to the programme which has been slated by a top United States medical journal for being unethical. […]