FINE ART: Ruth Sack GHETTO Opera House, massive and heavy, presides over Lucky Sibiya’s exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery. Into the multifarious sub-divisions of its architecture of bone, string, skin, paint, decaying machine parts, driftwood, rust, one is drawn without resistance or desire for explanation. Sibiya seems to be having some kind of party. […]

Scaw Metals’ new stake in a Chilean foundry opens the door to one of the world’s biggest growth markets in mining, reports Karen Harverson Scaw Metals of Germiston, part of Anglo American Industrial Corporation (Amic), has clinched a $12-million deal to buy a 50% stake in a foundry in Chile. The deal will enable Scaw […]

her With a 2-million kwacha (R8 000) price on her head, two of her colleagues already in prison, and police searching her friends’ homes for a clue to her whereabouts, Lucy Sichone still managed this week to publish her regular column in the outspoken Zambian newspaper The Post. Dr Robinson Nabulyato, speaker of the Zambian […]

Tina Turner inspired poetry and devotion at her first press conference back in SA. HAZEL FRIEDMAN was there IT began as an ordinary press conference — one of those affairs where journalists drink too much, get indigestion from bland answers to banal questions as well as stodgy snacks, and swear never to sacrifice another Saturday […]

THEATRE: Peter Frost THE Truth Fairy’s in town. A sharper-than-ever Pieter-Dirk Uys, not content with the abolition of the apartheid system, is now targeting the forgetful South African public with its recent past, using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as gunpowder. The result is big, entertaining bangs. Truth Omissions (at the Baxter in Cape Town) […]

THEATRE: Shaun de Waal PERHAPS one of the good things about the reshuffling of the arts councils will be that each province gets to see more of the others’ work — such as the two Capab productions directed by Marthinus Basson now showing in Johannesburg. (And let’s hope that one day he restages his much-lauded […]

One of South African students’ oldest traditions, Rag, is starting to change its whites-only image, reports Philippa Garson IT’S Rag time again. Time for students to take to the streets in the age-old tradition of “Remember and Give”. Or is it “Retch and Gag”, given the beer swilling, rugger bugger image of Ragites of yore, […]

With Dance Umbrella under way, HAZEL FRIEDMAN speaks to the grande dame of choreography, Sylvia Glasser CHOREOGRAPHERS, dancers and audiences at this year’s FNB Vita Dance Umbrella have all been asking: where is Sylvia Glasser? Though the veteran choreographer has not presented an individual performance under her Moving into Dance rubric, she has been visible […]

Dennis Davis criticised the Human Rights Committee; the chairman responded by calling him a racist. Now Davis asks why a man in this position uses hate speech SPEECH characterises our humanity. It is fundamental to the development of a community. But speech can be employed to exclude targeted individuals or groups from participation, or even […]

Agricultural output could account for a quarter of this year’s economic growth, reports Simon Segal THE most recent estimates from South African Agriculture Union economist Koos du Toit are that the good rains should see a 20% rise in the gross value of farm output this year to R35- billion (R28,9-billion was realised in 1995). […]