The refugees may be going, but the suffering continues. Chris McGreal reports from Mugunga IT might be that in the distant future someone will stumble upon Mugunga and wonder if they aren’t standing in the midst of some lost civilisation. Only a maze of walls laboriously cleaved from the harsh carpet of volcanic rock will […]

Protesters gathered in the Free State this week to call for the reinstatement of Terror Lekota as premier of the province. One of them spoke to Rehana Rossouw DESPITE the rain and the chilly weather on Wednesday, four busloads of elderly Free State residents stood outside the provincial government offices to protest the African National […]

THEATRE:Suzy Bell HE whacks unsuspecting kiddies on the head with a plastic baseball bat, offers them half-eaten rotten apples as if they were champagne truffles, and munches on sticky green spaghetti worms found in old tins of dog food. “Yech!” Screech the kids, but of course they love it. They love anything gross, obscene and […]

THEATRE: Andrew Wilson BEWARE – there’s a Nineties white male troopie on the loose: marginalised and misunderstood by a fickle, changing political landscape, and with no enemy left, he comes armed with insight, despair, and a kit-bag full of anecdotes. Currently on at the Civic, Greig Coetzee’s White Men With Weapons is less a play […]

Mail & Guardian Reporter AN attorney who achieved his long-held ambition to appear in the supreme court has laid defamation charges against a judge who criticised him for wearing a light-grey suit. Robert Chalom, an attorney who practices in the Johannesburg suburb of Bruma, told the Mail & Guardian this week he had laid the […]

Shaun de Waal FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS by Andrew Collins (Michael Joseph, R149,95) MAGI: IN SEARCH OF A SECRET TRADITION by Adrian G Gilbert (Bloomsbury, R149,95) THE TOMB OF GOD by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger (Little, Brown, R139,95) A TEST OF TIME by David Rohl (Arrow, R139,95) THE kind of books that used […]

Ann Eveleth THE “mysterious” exclusion of a prominent Nigerian from the search for a new English department head has divided academic staff at the University of Zululand. African literature specialist Professor Ramanas Egudu is lauded by his supporters at Unizulu as a “world-renowned scholar and expert on African poetry and oral traditions”. He was one […]

1976 Cabinet minutes quote Jimmy Kruger urging his colleagues to back shootings. Mungo Soggot and Stuart Hess report CABINET notebooks from 1976 reveal murder was official National Party policy, with the recommendation from the then minister of justice, police and prisons, Jimmy Kruger, that the police kill more people in the wake of the Soweto […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy After 17 years of broadcasting, Capital Radio will go off the air at exactly 6pm this Friday. Established in December 1979, Capital, based in Durban, has been an issue of debate between the telecommunications ministry and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) for eight months. Fifty employees will lose their jobs after months of […]

IVY MATSEPE-CASABURRI might want to ask herself whether she wants to be made premier of the Free State in the current circumstances – when she is getting the job because of the dismissal of a highly respected politician who won the post through the normal democratic procedures. But, if she still does want the job, […]