The SABC’s grand relaunch: Was it worth the money? Did anyone learn anything? Will advertisers support the new-look state television station? Jeff Zerbst found the SABC’s grand relaunch of its TV stations to be a spectacle loaded with symbolism for the new South Africa IT was in a spirit of awe and reverence that one […]

Gaye Davis TWENTY months after it first convened in Cape Town, what do South Africans think of their new Parliament? Perhaps predictably, opinion is mixed and differs along racial lines. The Public Opinion Service of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa (Idasa) surveyed a sample of 2 674 South Africans between September […]

The Nation of Islam leader spoke during his vist to South Africa this week of creating a homeland for more than a million black American convicts, report Vuyo Mvoko and David Beresford Louis Farrakhan, the Black American firebrand who is trying to fill the shoes of Martin Luther King, has dreamed an extraordinary dream — […]

Gaye Davis A POLITICAL wrangle is looming over who will succeed deputy speaker of the National Assembly Dr Bhadra Ranchod, who has made himself available for a diplomatic post. There is no constitutional provision for power-sharing when it comes to parliamentary positions. The overwhelming majority of committee chairs are held by the African National Congress […]

A row has arisen over illegal funding to self-protection units, writes Anne Eveleth A departmental secretary in Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s former homeland office, Stan Armstrong, is being named as a key player in the illegal funding row in which R8,6-million in taxpayers’ money was paid to members of Inkatha’s paramilitary self-protection units (SPUs). KwaZulu-Natal administrative […]

An installation at the Johannesburg Art Gallery reveals surprising new dimensions to traditional African art and craft, reports RUTH SACK THE status of traditional African crafts and artefacts in Western museums has long been a question of unending debate. Over the years it has been possible to observe, in our museums and galleries, how versions […]

Bronwyn Jones finds more brilliant and bizarre inventions in her monthly look through the Patents Journal DON’T let the thousands of expected redundancies at Anglo American’s Freegold fool you; if the Patents Journal is anything to go by, South African mining is going from strength to strength. There are 15 major new mining patents this […]

Karen Harverson Once exchange controls are lifted, the South African investment community’s interest in offshore opportunities will snowball, says Syfrets Group chief executive Christopher Beatty, speaking at a launch this week of new international investment products. However, he cautioned that investors need to react quickly to changes in the international economy and understand the risks […]

CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale HUEY NEWTON, one of the founders of the Black Panther movement, was a great fan of Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song. He even analysed that funky box-office smash, writing that its tale of a hustler who evolves into a revolutionary was an allegory of a `street brother who […]

Dirk Hartford It was reminiscent of the heady mass struggles of the Eighties. For four hours last Sunday, several hundred trade unionists listened to fiery speeches from workers and trade union leaders denouncing the government and its policy of national reconciliation as a `national disaster’ between songs praising socialism as the only road to liberation. […]