STEVEN MANN, Cape Town | Saturday 6.00pm SOUTH Africa’s elite crime fighting unit, the Scorpions, is to head investigations into Friday night’s bomb attack outside a Greenpoint restaurant on Friday night which left seven policemen injured, two of them seriously. Safety and Security Minister Steve Tshwete made this announcement after visiting the scene of the […]

TELFORD VICE, Durban | Saturday 6.00pm. ENGLAND await injury verdicts while South Africa face a selection dilemma on the eve of the third Test at Kingsmead on Sunday. Another problem for both sides has been this week’s flash floods in Durban, which have killed at least 23 people and left thousands homeless. England have been […]

TELFORD VICE, Durban | Friday 6.00pm. WARY England spoke to third test referee Barry Jarman on Friday as a damp pitch revived the spectre of their disastrous first clash with South Africa. Two days before the start, a sign on the edge of the Kingsmead wicket read uncompromisingly: ”Pitches and outfield out of bounds to […]

shook the world “Search in your past for what is good and beautiful. Build your future from there.” – Paul Kruger, 1902 “The only white race that has steadily been going backwards to barbarism.” – Sir Garnet Wolseley comments on the Boers during the Anglo-Boer South African War “E=mc2” (Energy equals mass times the speed […]

The theatres may have been empty, but 1999 saw massive new audiences for television and music, writes Charl Blignaut Television One day near the beginning of 1999 a producer at Generations was called to reception at the SABC studio to “deal with a situation”. Waiting for him with a letter in her hand was an […]

Robert Kirby We approach the end of the century and it’s nowhere to be found. The long- awaited, enviously portentous but never threatening: the Great South African Novel is yet to be written. It’s not that there hasn’t been a wealth of human experience in this country. This century kicked off with a boisterous local […]

Aaron Nicodemus PERSON OF THE YEAR … CHARLENE SMITH Charlene Smith’s home has become a national clearing house for information on rape and Aids. She receives five or six calls a day from rape survivors, asking for help and support. She gets calls from government officials, women’s groups, doctors, policemen, insurance companies, men married to […]

In the mid-1800s, it was derided by Europe as an ‘experiment in gross vulgarity’. Today, it bestrides the world culturally, economically, technologically and militarily. Christopher Hitchens charts the unstoppable rise of the United States Who looks at an American book?” asked the Reverend Sydney Smith scornfully in the Edinburgh Review of the mid- Victorian epoch. […]