The most vulnerable groups in South Africa — the poor, the elderly, the disabled and the abandoned — are being hit hard by burgeoning problems in social security offices across the country, as they struggle to claim their state grants from demoralised, ill-informed and sometimes deceitful civil servants. This year, the implementation of the new […]
Mungo Soggot SASOL has won an extraordinary case against a magistrate who ordered the synthetic fuel company to disclose documents relating to a devastating mining accident which killed 53 workers. A commission of inquiry into the explosion — which took place at the company’s Middelbult colliery in 1993 — was suspended last year when the […]
Lionel Mtshali will be sailing outgoing minister Ben Ngubane’s old boat — but not rocking it. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports FROM arts and culture to agriculture. That’s where the outgoing Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Professor Ben Ngubane, is heading when he assumes his new post as minister of finance and agriculture in the […]
Giles Foden TS ELIOT’S youthful poems collected as Inventions of the March Hare appear at a time when the reputation of this notoriously difficult — and massively influential — modernist poet faces reassessment. Though American-born, Eliot was known to be politically and religiously conservative. Accusations of anti-Semitism have recently been made, sparking debate in literary […]
Andrew Meldrum in Harare A SHOWDOWN is looming for President Robert Mugabe’s government as 60 000 civil servants continue to strike for pay rises of more than 20%. With hospitals overstretched, mortuaries overflowing and airports in chaos, the strike, now in its second week, is the biggest and most disruptive since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. […]
strategy Gaye Davis A SEARING critique of the government’s macro-economic framework has come from the national political education secretariat of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Published this month in the debut edition of the new left-wing journal Debate, the critique, by Langa Zita, Dale McKinley and Vishwas Satgar, amounts to a fundamental rejection of […]
If the revival of Afrikaans culture is to be determined by plays like Donkerland, we’re certainly not moving forward, writes ANDREW WILSON AFTER decades of cultural self- confinement, broken only sporadically, and then only by the minority, Afrikaans theatre, music and cabaret are back with new vigour. The clearest case in point was the untethered […]
This week saw the publication of You Have Been Warned, a book on the first 10 years of the Mail & Guardian.
The truth commission says its first amnesty is imminent, but old-guard perpetrators are still reluctant to bare their souls, reports Marion Edmunds Pressure on Justice Minister Dullah Omar to amend the Truth and Reconciliation bill and change the rules of amnesty is growing, as dissatisfaction with the process increases among those who served the apartheid […]
Mungo Soggot A string of sexy films heading for South Africa is set to test the mettle of the censorship board and its successor under the new Publications Bill. Leading the charge will be Crash which, according to one local reviewer, involves ”as much high-velocity sex as [there are] high-velocity car crashes”. Nu-Metro, the film’s […]