Hazel Friedman IRMA STERN: A FEAST FOR THE EYE by Marion Arnold (Rembrandt van Rijn Art Foundation, R197,99) IN these earnest, multi-culturally correct times, it’s not merely fashionable to trash artist Irma Stern. It’s downright obligatory. She is variously called the female version of Tretchikoff, a mediore modernist whose paintings are but poor imitations of […]

David Beresford THE Guardian has obtained documents which throw doubt on the explanations offered by the Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Exeter, John Lloyd, as to why he betrayed a fellow anti-apartheid activist to the South African hangman in the mid-1960s. A letter by Lloyd the year after the execution of John Harris appears to […]

Collin Matjila, chairman of the executive committee of the Greater Johannesburg TMC, in The Mark Gevisser Profile Who? This is the man who, for the past year, has controlled a budget of R6-billion, bigger than that of four provinces and over half the size of Gauteng’s. This is the man who has had 35 000 […]

Jan Taljaard EVEN before the ballots were counted this week, South African right-wingers knew they had reached the crossroads. The Freedom Front saw the local government elections as an opportunity not only to emerge as king of the right- wing heap, but also to make significant inroads into a disenchanted voters’ base that once belonged […]

Cinema: Derek Malcolm CHRIS MONGER, the writer-director of The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, once made an existential thriller called Voice-Over, which was shown at the Edinburgh Festival and was radical enough to suggest that the last thing he would do would be to escape Wales for Los Angeles […]

Gold mining no longer glitters all that brightly for the South African economy. Reg Rumney reports Working seven days a week will help gold mines survive in the medium term — but gold mining is in decline, says Amgold chairman Clem Sunter. Gold mining, once the mainstay and still a central pillar of the South […]

Ann Eveleth While most South Africans were preparing for last year’s elections, an ambitious group of right-wingers was plotting to sieze control of KwaZulu-Natal, the Estcourt Regional Court heard this week. AWB member Freddie Steyn testified that he and five right-wingers on trial for illegal possession of weapons, explosives and poison had planned to seize […]

Old attitudes die hard in Ventersdorp, as Justin Pearce discovered VENTERSDORP looked as if it were hosting a foreign correspondents’ convention on Wednesday. The town of the AWB had a date with the new South Africa. It was surely a story to make soundbites throughout the world, and the media were there to tell it. […]

Philippa Garson looks into some possible scenarios for higher education in South Africa THOSE who encountered the 1990 Mont Fleur scenarios, symbolic representations of the country’s possible futures on the pinnacle of its transition, can probably remember the too-much-too-soon Icarus, the hamstrung lame duck, the head-in-the-sand ostrich and the soaring flamingos. With the exception of […]

The Third Force: Apartheid’s chickens come home to roost with the arrest of retired generals and a former defence minister Mail and Guardian reporters General Magnus Malan and 10 former colleagues were arrested because police seized top-secret documents linking them to an Inkatha hit-squad and the birth of the “Third Force”. KwaZulu-Natal’s cautious Attorney General […]