Shaun de Waal The books that most profoundly shaped the thought of this century were written before it began – Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Each in its way was at the epicentre of a movement that rippled out […]

barbarians Millennial fears of Y2K chaos and resulting social disorder are merely expressions of intense political anxieties, writes Bryan Rostron ‘Imagine,” said the minister’s adviser, pointing at the sprawling squatter settlement on the mountain opposite my home, “as clocks tick over to 2000, if government computers crash, power failures, communications, police and army disoriented.” He […]

A hundred years ago Marlow, the steamboat captain in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, mused about the rape of the Congo, then in full fury under the Belgian King Leopold. The conquest of the Earth, which “mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is […]

Andy Capostagno It should have been the best of times, but far too often it was the worst of times. Australians will not remember the cricket and rugby world cups of 1999 in such negative terms, but the truth hurts. Here were two tournaments four years in the making, on comfortable growth curves from successful […]

Two thousand years of Christianity is too much, yet somehow not quite enough, argues Shaun de Waal The year 2000 looms. What are we celebrating, or about to celebrate? Two millennia of Christianity? Or a triumph of marketing in which we’ve forgotten the product but been dazzled by the catchphrase? Not that it really is […]

South African film production began with the Anglo-Boer War – and remained in the trenches, writes AndrewWorsdale Cut to SouthEAfrica at the beginning of the century. The country is at the forefront of film-making internationally. No one in the industry is bitching about viability. It’s really Hollyveld, and it’s amazing. Given the dreary state of […]

Isabel Hilton Jiang Zemin, president of the People’s Republic of China, can look back on 1999 with some satisfaction: it was the year in which he began to make his bid for immortality, his place in the pantheon of Chinese leaders, alongside Mao and Deng. So far, he could say to himself, so good. Some […]

‘He, which hath no stomach to this fight / Let him depart, his passport shall be made / And crowns for convoy put into his purse: / We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us” -Henry V’s Crispian Day speech at Agincourt, by William Shakespeare There […]

Over the past 100 years sport has changed from a mere pastime to a multibillion-rand industry, writes Julia Beffon Before 1900 the word “sport” hardly existed in the context we now know it: amateurs played games, or excelled in one or other semi-military discipline, but few made physical exercise a career. Today sport is a […]

Fiona Macleod The pendulum swings for 594 plant species, 14 animal species, 62 bird species and dozens of insect species in Southern Africa at the turn of the millennium. Already in the past couple of centuries, at least 59 Southern African species are known to have become extinct. The list includes 53 plants, two butterflies, […]