Cindy Shiner in Accra NINE West African heads of state met in the Ghanaian capital Accra this week for an emergency summit to try to end the renewed civil war in Liberia. Hopes of success are slim. Officials are trying to rehabilitate an eight- month-old agreement that was supposed to lead to the disarmament of […]
Greg Barrow in Nairobi THE Kenyan government has published a 40-page dossier defending its human rights record. The report comes as Kenyan human rights groups grow increasingly vocal about a rise in mob violence and a breakdown of law and order. In the report, The Way It Is, the government says its overall record is […]
AMID all the talk of unbundling and black empowerment, one obvious means of broadening the economic powerbase — employee share ownership programmes (Esops) — is being largely ignored. Not to be confused with share incentive schemes, which are aimed at management, Esops are open to all employees, with the employer providing the funding mechanism. Says […]
The Reverend Fernando Kuthino promised everything from a place in heaven to a cure for Aids, but he was no match for President Mobutu Sese Seko. Chris McGreal reports FOR Israel Ciswaka, his pastor’s arrest, torture and dispatch to a Zairean military prison for 12 months’ hard labour was confirmation that there is a God […]
Africanist academics have come together to mobilise for change on campuses — and they have the government’s latest report on tertiary institutions in their sights. Justin Pearce reports A GROUP of black academics is set to do battle with the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE), a body appointed by Parliament to find a new […]
After watching a two-hour performance by Shaggy, the Jamaican-born ragga performer, at the Standard Bank Arena in Johannesburg, I went home to listen to my old Bob Marley CDs. This was an attempt to find out when the defiantly clenched fist of Third World anthems like Get Up! Stand Up! had transformed into seemingly painful […]
The Hughes brothers’ debut feature, Menace II Society, was a clichéd story of the hood; filmed with flair on a budget of $3-million, it grossed over 10 times that amount. Dead Presidents, their second feature, was made with the support of big bucks — and while it covers familiar territory (the Vietnam war, ghetto violence), […]
Luan Nel abandons his miniature landscapes and transforms concrete walls into canvases for a show this weekend. He spoke to Hazel Friedman.
Hollywood came to town this week — in the form of Jean-Claude Van Damme. He spoke to Peter Johnson.
The feel-good, teenage boy rite-of-passage pic set in the early Sixties has, in the Nineties, become a genre all of its own. The era of JF Kennedy is, after all, easy to invoke as white America’s age of innocence — a social-science lab purged of confounding variables where all the truisms about character, honour, manhood […]