The work at this year’s Grahamstown Festival rejoiced=20 in cultural freedom — and shied away from socio- political issues, writes Justin Pearce FOUR African men speaking algemeen beskaafte Afrikaans,=20 while a rainbow-nation audience convulses with laughter=20 as they impersonate traffic cops, tsotsis, and the Paul=20 Kruger statue. It all adds up to a vision of […]

Eastern Transvaal Premier Mathews Phosa, in The Mark Gevisser Profile When Mathews Phosa was at high-school in Acornhoek in the early 1970s, he and a group of students were given a chilling ultimatum after disrupting a Parents’ Day event: they could choose between expulsion or being stripped naked and lashed with a hippo-hide sjambok. “Our […]

The Mail & Guardian recently wrote to cabinet ministers asking an innocuous question. The replies, or lack of them, were rather enlightening … Minister of Public Enterprises Stella Sigcau is the winner of the Mail & Guardian’s first Cabinet Efficiency Test (CET). The CET was conducted to measure the speed and competence with which cabinet […]

Justin Pearce THE boy whose designer tackies went up in flames=20 decided things had gone a bit too far. He’d come along=20 to an honest techno rave, was minding his own business=20 at 120 beats per minute, when this flaming tennis ball=20 came rolling across the floor, reducing R500 worth of=20 footwear to a charred […]

Rocky’s on a roll, and he’s doing his damnedest to shake off the moss of his past, reports Stefaans BrUmmer ROCKY MALEBANE-METSING — coup maker, would-be provincial premier, ANC ally turned thorn — has reinvented his role in politics. The vehicle for the emergence of the new Rocky is the “triple-P”, his People’s Progressive Party, […]

Chemical giant Hoechst SA’s managing director, Reinhard=20 Traub, speaks to Aspasia Karras Reinhard Traub, managing director of chemical company=20 Hoechst SA, which went public last week, had a long=20 career within Hoechst’s multinational network before=20 coming to South Africa in 1989. He has a cosmopolitan air which he attributes to a=20 deep-seated appreciation for each […]

CRICKET: Jon Swift KRISH MACKERDHUJ and the United Cricket Board (UCB) he=20 heads are faced with a problem shared with the majority=20 of nations in the cricket-playing world. It is simply this: how to fill the empty stands over=20 five long days of a Test match. “People had become too=20 used to the one-day game […]

This weekend’s IFP national conference will look at ways for the party to consolidate its power in KwaZulu/Natal, report Ann Eveleth and Mehlo Mvelase The rumour mills have been peculiarly quiet this week in the run-up to the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) national conference opening in Ulundi tonight. Party sources poured cold water on earlier […]

Anne Eveleth Pietermaritzburg Mayor Rob Haswell’s call this week for the Durban-Maritzburg corridor to become South Africa’s 10th province — divided by soft boundaries from the rest of conflict-ridden KwaZulu/Natal — has struck at the heart of the incessant demarcation wrangles stalling Durban’s local government process. Won by the African National Congress in last year’s […]

M&G reporters After battling to integrate former enemies into South Africa’s National Defence Force, the SANDF is now facing an even bigger challenge: how to demobilise 30 000 soldiers. Jakkie Cilliers, Director of the Institute of Defence Policy (IDP), says it was a mistake to integrate before demobilising. “Now, after they have decided who joins […]