The people of Namaqualand didn’t just want to see the queen, they wanted to ask her for help, writes Justin Pearce The people from Namaqualand didn’t wave flags to greet Queen Elizabeth on her arrival in Cape Town on Monday. They waved placards. The only obviously dissenting voices in the crowd, they had travelled 500km […]
ROCK: Guy Willoughby ‘W HO are the Africans, after all?” asks the throatily- toned Bill Knight, right at the start of Skollie Rock,=20 his debut collection of self-penned songs. The songwriter=20 don’t provide no easy answers, as Mr Dylan might say, but=20 the question goes to the heart of his problem on this=20 interesting, uneven […]
Clive Simpkins South AfricaN hotels seem to view conferences as pain- in-the-bum necessities rather than desired business even=20 though they market themselves as function and conference=20 venues in addition to their regular trade.=20 Now that we’re pulling out of=20 a depression, the expertise and staffing lag in=20 conferencing structures almost guarantees a traumatic=20 experience for […]
PAC President Clarence Makwetu used Sharpeville Day to remind people that nothing much had changed in South Africa. This is an edited version of his speech The day Comrade Mandela was inaugurated in May last year, we watched with interest the fly-past. Here was the South African air force demonstrating its might. Here was the […]
The auditor-general’s report to parliament on the Transkei Public Debt Commission is a litany of corruption and incompetence, writes Gaye Davis SPARE a thought for Eastern Cape premier Raymond Mhlaba, for he has inherited the shambles left by the administrative collapse of Transkei. Spare a thought too for taxpayers, for they will be footing the […]
Gaye Davis A TRIUMPHANT Winnie Mandela is weighing up launching a civil suit for damages against Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi, sources close to the deputy minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology indicated this week. She consulted with her lawyer, Templeton Mageza, on Wednesday to “discuss the way forward” after the Rand […]
Louise Flanagan Although Ernst Penzhorn and some of his partners at the prestigious Pretoria law firm where he worked at the time, MacRobert De Villiers Lunnon and Tindall, have registered several front companies for MI, both the military and Penzhorn deny he worked for Military Intelligence (MI) Information published at the time of the Harms […]
THEATRE: Bafana Khumalo T HERE is something terribly dated about The Hill, a=20 Zakes Mda-penned play looking at the lives of the poor in=20 Southern Africa. It transports one back to the bad old=20 past, when migrant labour was still considered a thing=20 worth talking about and the collusion of the church in=20 people’s oppression […]
One of the pioneers of long-distance education, Michael Young, suggests a new use for Robben Island IN the primary school hangs a large model of the most famous prison island in the world. The plaster island, made by the children, is green and peppered with tiny squares for the white houses where they and their […]
The Markets Jacques Magliolo Suddenly, mysteriously, the markets have gone strangely=20 quiet. After two weeks of intense activity, the=20 Johannesburg Stock Exchange trading floor this week was=20 more like a museum than South Africa’s financial centre. To make matters worse, nobody seems able to provide a=20 reason for the total lack of investor interest across […]