The old bones of slavery -on which Cape Town was built – are rising to the surface. Mike Nicol, this week’s guest writer, speaks to a group trying to deal with this legacy ON a traffic island in the middle of Cape Town’s Spin Street is a low, round cement memorial. An inscription in English […]

poachers Eddie Koch IT was the week in which conservationists launched a series of missions to save not the white rhino or an endangered species of whale but thousands of poisonous scorpions, hairy baboon spiders and swimming crabs that were plundered from Mozambique in an effort to smuggle them out of the country through South […]

Duncan Mackay AT least four positive drug tests taken at the Olympic Games in Atlanta are yet to be made public, according to an expert on testing. Only two positive tests were reported from athletics events at this summer’s Games, which were hailed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)president Juan Antonio Samaranch as among the […]

Gwen Ansell CLUB-OWNERS and artists aren’t always bosom buddies. And when jazz clubs close, the musicians are often ambivalent mourners, finding it hard to regret the passing of managements that paid them poorly or not at all. But this week it’s the musicians who’ve come together to try to save Melville’s Bass Line, which, with […]

Marion Edmunds THE R18-million Presidential Review Commission (PRC) – tasked to investigate the public service – is heading for a crash, and may well be deproclaimed by Cabinet, a year before concluding its business. Sources say that Public Service Minister Zola Skweyiya has instructed his staff to prepare a Cabinet memorandum suggesting the PRC be […]

SOCCER:Andrew Muchineripi HAVING already won the African Champions Cup and Super Cup within a few months, defending African champions Orlando Pirates will now focus their sights on the African Cup Winners Cup, which is known as the Nelson Mandela Cup. But first, they will have to sweep aside the challenge of Jomo Cosmos when the […]

FINE ART: Hazel Friedman CARL GIETL’S exhibition 1996 is and is not what it seems. The paradoxical seductiveness of his work is that while it has been conceptualised with such obvious – almost simplistic – clarity of purpose, in the eyes of the beholder it takes on a metaphoric life (or in this case, death) […]

Marion Edmunds THEY are called the “Gestapo”. These are not the security police but the men from the Medicines Control Council (MCC) inspectorate who stand accused of raiding and harassing homeopaths and dispensers of natural medicines. And while some homeopaths have sunk into silence for fear of having their businesses closed down, others have started […]

The M&G’s guest writer Hein Marais visited the SACP’s headquarters and found a party still spinning as it tries to recreate its role THERE’S not much here to bolster one’s preconceptions. The offices are not sandwiched into Shell House. They’re not festooned with posters of Karl and Vladimir or peppered with souvenirs from China and […]

Stephen Buckley in Gisenyi, Rwanda AS they hustled to escape the world’s largest refugee camp last week, thousands of Rwandans left behind some of their most important possessions: their children. Some youngsters got separated from loved ones during the two weeks when as many as 500 000 Rwandan refugees were crushed into Mugunga camp in […]