Shared concerns have persuaded South Africa’s editors to unite in one body, writes Anton Harber WHEN Tribute magazine editor S’bu Mngadi told the editors’ unity conference last weekend that the media industry was still racist, it brought a moment of rare silence from the more than 80 senior journalists present. Mngadi’s passionate outburst against those […]

They killed alongside adults; now the child fighters of Sierra Leone are experiencing childhood, writes Claudia McElroy THE classroom’s sea of faces wear expressions ranging from lively interest and bewilderment to boredom and incomprehension. Yet for most of these youngsters at a centre for ex- combatants, grappling with basic literacy is better than life at […]

Alex Sudheim SIX years ago Nadine Raal was crooning for her supper in smoky jazz clubs on Durban’s Point Road, serenading inebriated audiences with Blue Moon and Old Man River. “But,” sing Pavement, masters of slanted and subverted country music, “you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent.” Presumably Raal doesn’t have too […]

Mungo Soggot went to Ogies to visit the man who looks after the world’s largest oil storage facility, apartheid’s oil stash IT is difficult to believe Frikkie Cloete when he points across a bleak mielie field in the middle of Mpumalanga and says “all this is oil – for 6km that way”. But Cloete, manager […]

BAFANA KHUMALO travelled to the Karoo to visit the set of the film Paljas, a collaboration between Katinka Heyns and Anant Singh MANY a traveller, in the relative comfort of his train compartment, has rattled past this dusty cell and thanked his god that it was not his home. The house on the side of […]

Cape Marion Edmunds THE Cabinet has dispatched a crack team of civil servants and international experts to Bisho to investigate the administrative chaos in the Eastern Cape. The team, which includes a deputy director- general, chief directors and Swedish and British experts, is spending two weeks in the Eastern Cape and will report back with […]

THE little girl’s head was jerked back, seeming to stare longingly up the hill toward those who had fled without her. In the town below, young thugs pranced through the streets celebrating her brutal death. One of them had skewered the child through the throat as they hunted down people who had once been their […]

David Beresford WHATEVER the cause of the Samora Machel air crash, there is one scandal involving the actions of the South African authorities which has not been fully exposed – relating to Mozambique state documents on board the aircraft. A little more than a week after the crash a diplomatic row blew up with allegations […]

Mac Maharaj details his department’s new plan to modernise all aspects of South Africa’s transport management WE all take the existence of roads, railways, airports and harbours for granted and only curse the inconvenience when confronted by traffic jams, accidents, ungovernable taxis and airport strikes. Still, in our better moments, most of us believe that […]

Alan Finlay TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS by Phil Crow (Wordsure, R20); THE END OF THE LINE by Craig Lock (Minerva, R49,99); AFTER THE ECLIPSE by Tom Rymour (Discobolus Readware, R70) SET in the English department of a certain Rondebosch University, Twilight of the Idols is an uneven text of sometimes accomplished ideas but, on the […]