A decision by curators will allow indigenous people to claim back body parts of ancestors which have been kept at museums, writes Eddie Koch A CONFERENCE of South African museum curators last week resolved to back demands for the body parts of a Khoisan woman whose pickled brains and genitalia are being stored in a […]
Evita Bezuidenhout would have loved these designs for a national costume, writes HAZEL FRIEDMAN THE designers might have been billed as the Young Lions of local fashiondom, but some of the creations spawned by the finalists of the South African Fashion Designers Association (Safda) competition would have been more deserving of disaster-relief aid than a […]
Luan Nel abandons his miniature landscapes and transforms concrete walls into canvases for a show this weekend. He spoke to HAZEL FRIEDMAN VISITING the site of Luan Nel’s Centre is like watching an old silent movie (in technicolour) at the Top Star drive-in. Giant, flickering images – many of them bucolic in mood – are […]
Secret documents handed in at the Malan trial last week link two current cabinet ministers to violent raids into Lesotho in the 1980s. Minutes of the State Security Council (SSC) show Minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs Pik Botha was authorised – along with three other ministers in the National Party government – to use […]
Gaye Davis All three issues outstanding appear in the draft Bill of Rights of the new Constitution. They are: l Education: The ANC and NP clauses agree on the right to education in the official language of one’s choice in public educational institutions, where reasonably practicable, and that national legislation and policy will play a […]
Moyiga Nduru A banana war between two of Somalia’s main warlords is under way over the control of the lucrative banana export trade. The forces of General Mohamed Farah Aideed, the self-proclaimed president of Somalia, are pitted against the militiamen of his former financier, Ali Hassan Osman “Atto”. Aideed needs the revenues, estimated at around […]
THE advice to NGOs to “adapt or die” in a changing environment is becoming painfully repetitive. It is also superfluous, as we – the remaining NGOs –would not have survived until now if we had not constantly restructured, repositioned and transformed ourselves. In her response (“NGOs are not about to roll over”, April 19 to […]
Raising interest rates may not be enough to save the rand. Government needs to define a firm strategy for growth, argues Madeleine Wackernagel When the authorities finally moved to stabilise the battered rand, it was a case of too little, too late. If a hike in interest rates was the solution, the Reserve Bank should […]
BARBARA Hogan, the African National Congress MP hotly tipped to succeed Gill Marcus as chairman of the influential Joint Standing Committee on Finance, this week stepped down as a candidate for the chair. Hogan, who has been one of the committee’s most active members, said she had opted out of the running as she preferred […]
IN February of 1994, two months before the elections, I returned to South Africa. Accompanied by a friend, I embarked on a four- week journey to explore the Northern Cape, Namaqualand and the Karoo, areas which have always fascinated me. Because I have lived abroad for so many years, my perceptions and expectations were influenced […]