The man at the centre of a black-white battle for Zimbabwe’s tobacco trade has links with a former CCB agent, reports Jan Raath The delicate perfume of freshly cured, silk- textured, golden tobacco leaf wafting from the sprawling tobacco auction floors in Harare is the setting for Zimbabwe’s latest race tangle. A bitter black-white war […]
Simon Segal The government has finally moved to smooth the path of foreign aid, after years of difficulties and frustrations encountered by foreign donors. It has closed the interdepartmental International Development Co-operation Committee chaired by Elty Links, who has been appointed South Africa’s ambassador to the European Union. Instead, all official development assistance now falls […]
Rehana Rossouw THE failure of some magistrates and members of the medical profession to assist victims of human rights abuses emerged as a theme in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Western Cape hearings this week. The family of Looksmart Ngudle, a journalist and Umkhonto weSizwe operative who died in detention in September 1963, testified that […]
A strange case has been under way this week in the Kempton Park magistrate’s court — an application for the extradition of a British spy, Paul Grecian, to the United States. Grecian, the man credited with blowing the cover on Saddam Hussein’s project to build a “super-gun”, was arrested on December 15 while on a […]
ANDREW WORSDALE spoke to the movie-mad director of the South African/Indian film, The Making of a Mahatma LAST weekend’s lush premiere of The Making of a Mahatma — the first feature film to be co-produced by South Africa and India — had a distinctly political feel to it. Newly appointed Minister of Trade and Industry […]
TELEVISION: Hazel Friedman IT doesn’t require an analyst to read between the lines of the SABC’s first public forum for discussion of the weird and wanton ways of the print media. In fact, after three episodes of this long-overdue, well-intentioned but weakly conceived programme, the cracks in Between the Lines can be measured on the […]
THEATRE: David Le Page BESSIE HEAD’S novel Maru is a stark dissection of racial prejudice, all the more compelling for looking at the relationship of black Batswana and the Bushmen. It is not a perfect novel, but there is enough insight, and unexpected writing, to make it memorable. Walter Chakela’s adaptation for the stage, now […]
CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale POSSIBLY the greatest action director in the world, John Woo is relatively unknown in South Africa. The only one of his films to have played on the main circuit is Hard Target, his first US feature, with local boy Arnold Vosloo as a dinkum Afrikaans mercenary, and Jean-Claude Van Damme intent on […]
Mungo Soggot JUSTICE Minister Dullah Omar said this week he was awaiting “certain information” about the controversial retirement of former Witwatersrand attorney general Klaus von Lieres und Wilkau, but had yet to launch an official investigation. After resigning and receiving a R12 000-a-month ill-health pension courtesy of the taxpayer, Von Lieres took on the defence […]
Mungo Soggot MINERAL and Energy Affairs Minister Pik Botha wants a South African oil field deep in the heart of the old Soviet Union. He told the Mail & Guardian this week he is trying to perusade local oil companies to form a consortium to buy an oil field in Kazakhstan, one of several politically […]