This week’s guest writer Mandla Langa gives a personal account of his time as chair of Comtask A POET friend and comrade of mine who spent nearly three decades of his exile in the United States, speaks of menacing racist graffito sprayed on Alabama walls at the beginning of the civil rights movement. One particularly […]

TENNIS:Jon Henderson ACCORDING TO a remark attributed to no less an authority than her mother, Anna Kournikova is the future of tennis, which will be a source of hope to all those who have given up on the women’s game because of its cast of calamity-prone, one-dimensional “characters”. Certainly there is growing evidence that there […]

ONCE again the sight of Hutu refugees forlornly tramping from conflict in central Africa is tugging at the world’s heartstrings. It is a spectacle which has popped up on television screens periodically since the great exodus from Rwanda two-and-a- half years ago. And the United Nations is once again there to ensure that it can […]

REM frontman Michael Stipe’s dislike of clarity seems to grow with age. NEILSPENCER looks at his career FOR a man who has just carved himself a substantial slice of the biggest business deal in pop history, Michael Stipe sounds mightily disgruntled on his newly released album, New Adventures In Hi-Fi, and the bile flows from […]

PAPA WEMBA & KOFI OLOMIDE: Wake Up! (Sonodisc) KOFI OLOMIDE is back, this time pairing his smooth baritone with Wemba’s soaring falsetto for an album released last month. It sits firmly in the soukous tradition: plenty of soloing guitars, layered percussion and infectious sebene breaks on almost every track (for much of which we can […]

Famous scientists such as Richard Dawkins offer meaning for a post-religious age, writes Tim Radford RICHARD DAWKINS is nervous. This is very surprising. After all, he has done his homework: the topic for the evening is called “Arguments by Design”, a knowing play on the twist of natural philosophy that led indirectly to Charles Darwin’s […]

Madeleine Wackernagel SUBSTANTIAL falls in formal sector employment levels are threatening to undermine the government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy, which aims to create 400 000 jobs a year by the turn of the century, assuming economic growth of 6%. Two disturbing trends are coming to light – total employment, according to Central Statistical […]

Lesley Cowling THE Institute of Wine Biotechnology grew out of a new initiative called the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme (Thrip), which is administered by the Foundation for Research Development (FRD). The programme brings together industry, academic research and government in projects designed to serve national interests. The way it works is this: […]

Hazel Friedman AFTER five years of negotiating and 11 months after a deal was struck, actors are still stranded by the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) failure to sign a contract to protect their rights. And SABC officials don’t even know where the long-awaited Television Performers Contract is. Head of television Gill Chisholm told the […]

The three candidates for the vice- chancellorship made their presentations to capacity crowds. Andy Duffy reports WITS University stretched the principle of transparency to almost painful lengths this week. Searching for a successor to vice-chancellor Robert Charlton, the university put three candidates through public presentations and a grilling by students and a 28-strong selection committee. […]