Howard Barrell OVER A BARREL A problem with revolutionaries is that they tend to view themselves as indispensable. While they will say that the political change they helped secure was “inevitable”, they will nonetheless argue that their own intentional involvement was necessary to bring it about. By this curious reasoning, revolutionaries cast themselves as the […]

David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY Predictions offered by the oracles of the scientific age, intended for the stupefacation of their contemporaries, are more often quoted to the merriment of their descendants. The thought is prompted by Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) which has been offering its thoughts on the future of crime. They have […]

Olympics Grant Shimmin SWIMMING There’s something about an Olympic year that just seems to bring new swimming stars crawling out of the woodwork. I mean, prior to last weekend, who’d ever heard of Ed Moses in this country? No, I haven’t got my sports confused. I’m not talking about Llewellyn Herbert’s hero, the greatest 400m […]

John Matshikiza WITH THE LID OFF ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign:/’No more water, the fire next time!’” So run the words of the old Negro spiritual. The conflagration that consumed the bodies of some 500 members of an obscure Ugandan Christian cult which called itself the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments […]

Timothy Trengrove-Jones Like fashions, responses to HIV/Aids in this country seem to come in waves. And, in recent history, these waves tend to peak in March/April. On March 21 last year, supporters of the Aids Treatment Action Campaign lay down in the streets outside Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital to campaign for affordable and accessible treatment […]

Ebrahim Harvey CROSSFIRE David Hall, director of the Public Services International Research Unit, University of Greenwich, London, and an acknowledged authority on public services, has roundly condemned the iGoli 2002 plan as a “narrow vision and limited world view” in a booklet titled World-class Evidence against iGoli 2002. Has the management of iGoli 2002 and […]

Jean Spear Bundu bashing in Sandton. Home of the Big Five: BMWs, Nokias, Nikes, Fendi Bags and ridiculously overpriced Thai cuisine. Not the place you would expect to have an interactive experience with nature, but Gautengers were shown the wild side of the suburbs at a recent demonstration survival day. The well-manicured lawns of Bush […]

She’s young, black, British – and the first publishing sensation of the millennium Stephanie Merritt The hype began in late 1997. Zadie Smith was 21 and just down from Cambridge when her first novel was sold on a mere 80 pages for an advance rumoured to be in the region of 250 000. Some two-and-a-half […]

Shaun de Waal THE BIOGRAPHICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JAZZ by Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler (Oxford) VISIONS OF JAZZ: THE FIRST CENTURY by Gary Giddins (Oxford) THE HISTORY OF JAZZ by Ted Gioia (Oxford) W ith the North Sea Jazz Festival about to swing on to the shores of our southern seas, this would seem a […]

Paul Kirk The rate of HIV/Aids infection in the South African National Defence Force may be as high as 60% to 70% while in at least one military unit, 90% of the troops are infected with the virus. These extraordinary figures, leaked this week, were taken from preliminary HIV testing being conducted by the SANDF. […]