Bobby Windsor, the 1974 Lions hooker, gives his view from the heart of the pack SOUTH AFRICA is a rugby country like no other. In 1974 we were hated on the field but loved off it. The welcome was a clenched fist on the one hand and back- slapping hospitality on the other. Wherever we […]
FRIDAY, 12.00NOON: SOUTH AFRICA’s Trevor Wilkinson beat Geoff Davenport of Australia in an exciting match at the MacMed World Masters in Johannesburg on Thursday. Wilkinson won the semifinal 9-5, 8-10, 9-1, 9-10, 9-6, in a match plagued by bad decisions from referee Gordon Ashby. Wilkinson will play top-seed of the 35-39 division, Ashraf Hanafi of […]
Charl Blignaut TWO of the world’s greatest living playwrights, Ariel Dorfman and Steven Berkoff, are preparing to visit South Africa to attend the annual Grahamstown Arts Festival at the end of June. They mark the first in a string of well-known theatre figures who are planning South African visits and/or performances over the next few […]
The 50th Cannes film festival was one of the least memorable in years. DEREK MALCOLM loved and loathed the hype, and the line-up of films SYLVESTER STALLONE wished it could go on for ever. Shock-jock Howard Stern said, surveying the scene, “And they think I’m weird!” Most of the rest of us packed up to […]
BRENDA ATKINSON suggests that beastly is in the eye of the beholder FRENCH librarian and pornographer Georges Batailles, whose literary works were littered with corpses, sperm, eyeballs and the odd boiled egg, sought repeatedly to prove his own dictum that there is no prohibition that cannot be transgressed. Purity and Danger, curated by Penny Siopis, […]
Seth Nthai WE repeatedly hear arguments from certain political parties and individuals that the solution to our crime problems is to devolve enough police powers to provinces. According to them, devolution of police powers would strengthen the arm of the South African Police Service (SAPS). I believe the devolution of police powers to provinces, to […]
FRIDAY, 3.30PM RESIDENTS of Bushbuckridge who are agitating to have the area incorporated into Mpumalanga from Northern Province today delivered a memorandum to President Nelson Mandela notifying him of their intention to take the border dispute to court. “The people have resolved to donate R10 per family and business people from R100 and over to […]
Richard Williams on Eric Cantona, catalyst of Manchester United’s stunning revival, who announced his early retirement this week HOW typical of Eric Cantona that he should stand not upon the order of his going, but simply clear off. No farewell tours, no curtain calls. Yet, being Cantona, somehow the sense of a coup de thtre […]
South African film and film-makers are finally getting the recognition – and the budget allocation – they deserve. ANDREWWORSDALE details the good news IN the mid-1980s, South Africa produced up to 80 films a year, mostly financed through devious tax evasion schemes. Most of them were tacky American Ninja dramas or Platoon ripoffs with KwaZulu-Natal […]
Chris Petit THE UNTOUCHABLE by John Banville (Picador, R118) DISSECTING English characteristics of deceit and betrayal, John Banville locates their impulse not in any grand theorising but in a peculiarly English need for amusement and a corresponding fear of boredom. In one sense, The Untouchable is about dressing up. Victor Maskell – Banville’s fictional version […]