Pronounced guilty, Eugene de Kock will now have his turn to incriminate members of the old security forces, writes Eddie Koch The day of judgment had come. Yet there was no air of anticipation in the courtroom. No murmurs of approval in the gallery as the judge delivered his verdict. Not a single family member […]

Mungo Soggot Reserve Bank Governor Chris Stals’s key annual address this week drew consensus among economists that South Africa’s top banker is caught between a rock and a hard place. But while there was agreement that the economy’s vital statistics — huge imports, a shaky balance of payments, and crippling debt levels — were far […]

The most vulnerable groups in South Africa — the poor, the elderly, the disabled and the abandoned — are being hit hard by burgeoning problems in social security offices across the country, as they struggle to claim their state grants from demoralised, ill-informed and sometimes deceitful civil servants. This year, the implementation of the new […]

Mungo Soggot SASOL has won an extraordinary case against a magistrate who ordered the synthetic fuel company to disclose documents relating to a devastating mining accident which killed 53 workers. A commission of inquiry into the explosion — which took place at the company’s Middelbult colliery in 1993 — was suspended last year when the […]

Lionel Mtshali will be sailing outgoing minister Ben Ngubane’s old boat — but not rocking it. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports FROM arts and culture to agriculture. That’s where the outgoing Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Professor Ben Ngubane, is heading when he assumes his new post as minister of finance and agriculture in the […]

Giles Foden TS ELIOT’S youthful poems collected as Inventions of the March Hare appear at a time when the reputation of this notoriously difficult — and massively influential — modernist poet faces reassessment. Though American-born, Eliot was known to be politically and religiously conservative. Accusations of anti-Semitism have recently been made, sparking debate in literary […]

Andrew Meldrum in Harare A SHOWDOWN is looming for President Robert Mugabe’s government as 60 000 civil servants continue to strike for pay rises of more than 20%. With hospitals overstretched, mortuaries overflowing and airports in chaos, the strike, now in its second week, is the biggest and most disruptive since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. […]

strategy Gaye Davis A SEARING critique of the government’s macro-economic framework has come from the national political education secretariat of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Published this month in the debut edition of the new left-wing journal Debate, the critique, by Langa Zita, Dale McKinley and Vishwas Satgar, amounts to a fundamental rejection of […]

If the revival of Afrikaans culture is to be determined by plays like Donkerland, we’re certainly not moving forward, writes ANDREW WILSON AFTER decades of cultural self- confinement, broken only sporadically, and then only by the minority, Afrikaans theatre, music and cabaret are back with new vigour. The clearest case in point was the untethered […]

This week saw the publication of You Have Been Warned, a book on the first 10 years of the Mail & Guardian.