Barbara Ludman HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury) The newest Harry Potter hit the shelves this month, drawing South Africa into the Pottermania that has been sweeping American and British bookshops for the past couple of months. A few weeks ago, if you’d told a school librarian you had a […]

Kay Hassan, winner of the biggest prize in South African art history, talks to Alex Dodd ‘I am reclaiming the mask from Picasso,” says artist Kay Hassan, sitting among the paper scraps and ripped-up relics of commercial images that were once whole and powerful. “I am reclaiming the mask from Miro, from Matisse, from Braque […]

Donald McRae Even the heaving trains pulling away from Twickenham seemed to belong to Jonny Wilkinson. Two hours after he had broken the record for the most points scored in an international by an England player, the carriages were swaying in drunken tribute to the baby-faced kicker. The girls, for once on a Twickers train, […]

Housing in the Western Cape still reflects the stark contrasts of apartheid and economic divisions. Marianne Merten reports Daily life in Cape Town is a tale of three cities. Every morning, township commuters queue for the long trek into town, while residents of coloured areas squeeze into taxis for a high-speed chase to the central […]

Q & A Bheki Mkhwane rose from the ranks of a kierie-wielding security guard to being a successful playwright, director, actor, composer and choreographer. His collaboration with Greig Coetzee, Solomon’s Pride, won last year’s KwaZulu- Natal Vita Award for best production. What is the most boring thing on TV? The soap opera Generations. The theme […]

Ann Eveleth Hazardous skin-lightening creams banned seven years ago in South Africa are still widely available on the streets of Yeoville, Hillbrow and central Johannesburg. South Africa restricted the sale of products containing the bleaching agent hydroquinone to pharmacies in 1992, 17 years after South African medical research determined that the chemical causes severe disfigurement […]

Shaun de Waal Not the movie of the week Instinct is one of those big-budget films that are so fake and empty that one mourns the lavishing of all that money on such an unworthy project. How many interesting low-budget independent movies could have been made for that amount? Besides, I’m sure the gorillas of […]

Peter Dickson Albany farmers, who first clashed with the native Xhosa population over control of land in 1779, still appear to maintain a siege mentality 220 years on. Police report that criminal attacks on farms have reached an all-time high, and East Cape Agricultural Research Project (Ecarp) paralegal adviser Mzukisi Mali says the Eastern Cape, […]

WL Webb If there is a reading posterity, there is no doubt about the place in it of Gnter Grass’s best work. With Gabriel Garca Mrquez and some of his contemporaries in Eastern Europe, Grass has surely been one of the great shapers of literary consciousness in the latter half of the 20th century. >From […]

Mungo Soggot The Office of the Public Protector, one of the state’s main watchdogs against corruption and maladministration, has had a limited impact since its inception after the 1994 election. It has not exposed any significant instance of impropriety, and has at times allowed itself to be sidetracked by investigations of questionable importance. The office […]