With the local industry under pressure, South African mining houses are expanding further into Africa, reports Lynda Loxton SOUTH AFRICAN mining houses continue their march into Africa as local mines become more marginal and costs continue escalating. Several speakers this week told the second annual Investing in Mining Conference that local mining companies were increasingly […]

Gustav Thiel BUSINESS is moving – to Cape Town. To establish just how many companies are setting up shop in the Western Cape, and why, Wesgro, the parastatal established in 1986 to promote investment in the region, this week called for a detailed analysis of the trend. Wesgro urban and regional planner Rae Wolpe told […]

Mungo Soggot and Stuart Hess THE records of Cabinet meetings at which some of the most traumatic events of the period before the 1994 elections were discussed appear to have been gutted and sanitised. The records, released to the Mail & Guardian by the National Archives in Pretoria this week, are written in the style […]

FINE ART: Suzy Bell A GERMAN musician from a punk band stared dreamily up at Kali, the dramatic, colourful Hindu goddess who boldly wears a necklace of bloodied male skulls around her neck. In a hash-induced haze, as it was Goa (India) after all, he said: “Look how exciting Indian mythology is. Why is Christianity […]

Top ANC women helped establish the country’s first private deportation camp, reports HEIN MARAIS SEVERAL prominent women members of the African National Congress are linked to a private company running South Africa’s first private deportation camp. The Lindela Accommodation Centre, in Randfontein on the far West Rand, is a central holding point for captured illegal […]

PROTESTS at the inadequacy of South Africa’s stand against crime have become so generalised that they are no longer heard – they are reduced to the drone of the traffic in the street outside. But, at the risk of merely adding to a generalised clamour, some recent events – the theft of an 800kg automatic […]

Tangeni Amupadhi NATIONAL Police Commissioner George Fivaz’s warning this week that members of his force must shape up or ship out has caught even his most senior officers by surprise. In inquiries to provincial police commissioners around the country, the Mail & Guardian learned that they had been informed of the shakeup at the same […]

Justin Arenstein AUTOCRATIC management and a failure to consult with affected rural communities is threatening Mpumalanga’s revolutionary attempts to make its conservation areas pay for themselves. It was with the future of its conservation areas in mind that the Mpumalanga Parks Board granted commercial management of its reserves, which are largely undeveloped and which cost […]

A group of Christian churches has launched a vigorous anti-halaal campaign, reports Jan Raath in Harare A POWERFUL right-wing Christian fundamentalist group in Zimbabwe has launched a campaign against the country’s modest Muslim community to halt what it believes is a “dangerous and violent” religion with its eyes on taking over the government on its […]

Debate rages about the role the media should take in reporting the truth commission, writes Claudia Braude * the run-up to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducting hearings on the role played by the media during the apartheid years, the debate surrounding the press playing a reconciliatory role raged among journalists at a workshop held […]