A secret UN report has blamed Burundi’s army for assassinating President Melchior Ndadaye three years ago, reports Chris McGreal from Bujumbura A confidential United Nations report on the murder of Burundi’s first Hutu president — kept under wraps because of its potentially explosive impact on the conflict-ravaged country — accuses the army high command of […]
FINE ART: Hazel Friedman DON’T go looking for Lolita in Antoinette Murdoch’s debut solo show, Trane Trekkers. Unlike the nymphet in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Murdoch’s notions of the feminine are predicated not on precocious sexuality, but on transition; and her rites of passage are not trials by fire, but rather “fluid” journeys of purification. A […]
Ann Eveleth THE University of Zululand campus became a war zone this week as police and students clashed following the alleged rape of a female student in a campus residence last Saturday. Campus security fired teargas canisters on Tuesday to disperse students demanding the immediate suspension of Jabulani Msweli, the campus security guard charged with […]
Marion Edmunds and Stuart Hess THE government is going to battle to reduce the public service to meet its stated targets over the next three years, and to cut the enormous wage bill generated by its many employees. Senior sources in the Finance Department say it is accepted that targets are over-ambitious, and that the […]
Overseas acts provide all the excitement at next month’s Arts Alive festival, writes GWEN ANSELL BOLD and brassy Cuban ensemble Irakere will terrify the storks and electrify the dancers at Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake on September 8, as they kick off the popular music programme of this year’s Arts Alive Festival. Irakere, founded and led by […]
Madeleine Wackernagel In trying to bring the public service up to speed, the government has made a Faustian pact that could backfire, says one senior official in the Gauteng administration. “Only once we ran the statistics did we realise the scale of the problem. We need more money to keep the better people, which means […]
BRITAIN is not the only country wringing its hands over its performance at the Olympics. The Kenyan government plans to set up an independent commission to determine why its athletes won only one gold medal in Atlanta, the worst return since 1984. “We must go back to the drawing board and find the root cause […]
At one level it is possible to sympathise with Trevor Manuel with regard to his support for the All Blacks over the Springboks. If there is a game that conjures up the bad old days of apartheid it is rugby, a sport that tends to attract the passions of the sort of people (among others) […]
Alexander Sudheim A WELCOME change of location from the formal feel of last year’s event at the Natal Playhouse, the BAT Centre in Durban proved an inspired choice for the 1996 JPS Jazz Festival. At least 1 000 people visited on each of the three days to take in the likes of Bayete, Johnny Fourie, […]
Mungo Soggot FOR a member of the Free Market Foundation, Transnet chairman Louise Tager’s anti-privatisation stance is surprising. A glance at Tager’s curriculum vitae, supplied by Transnet, shows she has been a member of the Free Market Foundation since 1990, a trustee of the Don Caldwell Trust — another pro-privatisation group — since 1992, and […]