HUBBLE’S Universe: ANew Picture of Space (published by Constable), at first sight, looks like a coffee-table book on space, with bright dramatic pictures that suggest sci-fi book jackets or New Age tie-dyed shirts. But the pictures, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, are not simply beautiful – they are a way of understanding how the […]

Funding of the arts will soon rest in the hands of a National Arts Council. We look at the cultural politicking ahead. Katy Bauer MORE than a year after the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology commissioned the independent Arts and Culture Task Group (Actag) to compile an extensive report on how the arts […]

THERE can surely be no more glaring example of the bully-boy nature of South African rugby administration than the defeat of Brian van Rooyen in his bid to oust Louis Luyt as president of the Transvaal Rugby Football Union (TRFU). For what Luyt managed to do was turn the issue from one of what Van […]

Marion Edmunds THE Home Affairs Department has quietly dropped the fee charged to foreigners to marry South African citizens. In July this year, Home Affairs introduced regulations which made it obligatory for foreigners to pay a set charge of almost R7 000 should they wish to marry South African citizens. At the time, the department […]

With chaos and conflict spreading, Zaire, the UN and Western nations are seeing the consequences of their callous neglect, reports Chris McGreal THEODENNE KALENDA waited uncertainly one side of an invisible line that marks the border between Zaire and Rwanda, halfway across a bridge over the Ruzizi river. His neighbours watched from the hillside behind […]

CAROLINE SULLIVAN thought live hip-hop was boring – until she saw the Fugees play in London HOW big is “big”? In the Fugees’s case, big enough that Sony had to stop making their number-one single, Killing Me Softly, because it wouldn’t get out of the charts over the summer to make way for the next […]

They came as robbers to a house in Lenasia but they left as murderers of a young boy. Angella Johnson reports on the killing that shocked a community HE was only five years old. A boy delighted with himself after finding his lost piggy bank. But when Yaaseen Ebrahim rushed out of his room rattling […]

The truth commission’s Alex Boraine said the confessions would start. Last week, the perpetrators began to tell their stories. In the latest in our guest writer series, poet Antjie Krog listens to the different voices FOR six months the Truth Commission has listened to the voices of victims. The first narrative, focused and clear, cut […]

Not Quite Friday Night is back on our TV screens with a change of name.ANDREW WORSDALE talks to the director ON entering the room I notice an ashtray crammed with stompies and half-sucked cough sweets; a soundtrack features some eccentric interviewee and I catch the end of a sentence, ” … the heat then starts […]

Despite the loss of many familiar faces in the labour movement, unions deny a lack of leadership, write Jacquie Golding-Duffy and Anthony Kunda THE exodus in 1994 of many experienced unionists into the government and business dealt the labour movement a massive blow. When the likes of Jay Naidoo, Alec Erwin and Cyril Ramaphosa left, […]