The Economist magazine has devoted a lengthy article to Anglo American’s staunch advocacy of conglomeration, which it points out is long out of fashion in business schools and American boardrooms. The Economist reports the reaction of Anglo chairman Julian Ogilvie Thomson to the 20 percent or so disparity between Anglo’s net asset value and the […]

Mozambique’s rivers all originate elsewhere — and by the time they get to the drought-ravaged country, they are almost useless. Justin Arenstein reports Mozambican goodwill towards South Africa is drying up –with a growing clamour that South Africa is responsible for that country’s increasingly parched crops and dwindling rivers. Not even a flying visit to […]

Theatre: Marc Devenish IF you can’t resist a clever couplet, and go weak on witnessing an eloquent epigram, award-winning American playwright David Hirson’s play La Bete, at the Nico Arena in Cape Town, will provide you with a lifetime’s supply of both. If you ever hear another, it may, in fact, be too soon. Whatever […]

Neil Bierbaum Newspapers are finding it difficult to build black readership in the new South Africa. Despite the demand by advertisers to reach the powerful black consumer market, newspapers seem unable to deliver. A study of the All Media and Product Survey (Amps) figures for the past five years reveals that black readership of newspaper […]

Despite the recent strikes, local industrial unrest is on the decline, reports Meshack Mabogoane Though the latest nurses’ and municipal workers’ strikes have unleashed intense emotions and caused public disturbances, this year’s figures show industrial unrest to be at its lowest in five years. “The impression of industrial chaos is more a reaction to the […]

Peter Vale writes that the clash between gay people=20 and President Mugabe showed that civil society can=20 play a powerful role in Southern Africa=20 WHEN Robert Mugabe savaged the common law rights of=20 gays, he may well have initiated a geological shift=20 in the regional balance of power.=20 In the wake of his comments, South […]

Marion Edmunds=20 GOVERNMENT anthropologist Jan van Wyk is in a=20 quandary over who should be South Africa’s real=20 traditional leaders: “The definition of ‘leader’ is=20 easy, but ‘traditional’ creates more problems.=20 Basically, I think it’s about handing over the=20 goods, the values and culture from the past=20 generation to the present.”=20 That definition is not, […]