SAILING: Jonathan Spencer Jones THREE weeks into the third leg of the BOC Challenge single-handed around the world race and Christophe Auguin sailing Sceta Calberson has become the first of the entrants remaining in the fleet to round Cape Horn. Auguin, who days earlier had notched up a record 350,4 mile 24-hour run, passed about […]

Stanley Peskin DANCE Umbrella, now under the aegis of FNB Vita, is making its seventh appearance at the Wits Theatre. There will be an extended run of two and a half weeks, during which time the work of 115 choreographers will be featured. The emphasis will fall on different dance idioms in a contemporary style. […]

Stefaans Brummer THE all-pervasive influence of South Africa’s securocrat chiefs in the mid-1980s — through an intricate web of covert propaganda projects — has been revealed in a classified State Security Council document released by former spy Craig Williamson. The 1984 document audits “strategic communication” (stratcom) projects run by the police, the military and the […]

Farouk Chothia KENYAN mediator Professor Washington Okumo said this week in an interview from Maputo that he had expected international mediation to take place in the aftermath of the April election in line with an agreement between the three major political parties days before the poll. Okumo brokered the agreement that saw the IFP enter […]

Shadley Nash EZEKIEL MSIZI cast his steely gaze over the paddock where a dozen or more cows were being milked with hi-tech electronic equipment. “We want to come home. The white farmers’ time is up,” he said. Msizi’s impatience signals growing discontent in the ranks of the Mfengu community over the fact that they are […]

Moveable Feast Marino Corazza FROM Benoni to Bedfordview, Florida to Ferndale, Swellendam to Sabi, cafes across the country are invested with same nostalgia. Their names refer to the places their owners emigrated from a long time ago — Mykonos, Apollo, Hellenic, Paphos, The Acropolis, like a travel brochure on Greece and the islands — while […]

Evidence of murders motivated by greed rather than revelations of political crimes dominated the first days of Eugene de Kock’s trial, writes Jan Taljaard BOGGED down in intricate legal argument for the first two days of proceedings, the Eugene de Kock trial did not look to be the curtain raiser to the “truth hearings” or […]

Inge Ruigrok THE Greater Johannesburg TMC this week granted welfare organisations a reprieve until June from the death blow of having to pay full municipal rates on their properties. The move was in response to pressure from the “Lobby Against Rates” — a delegation of Gauteng-based welfare organisations — and took the form of an […]

Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi resorted to the politics of tantrums this week when he led a walkout from parliament. But more important than criticising this return to his pre-election ways is to understand why he is doing it and President Nelson Mandela’s somewhat limited options in dealing with it. The immediate concerns that lay behind the […]