With the high crime rate, South African drivers are increasingly signing up for breakdown cover, reports Jacqui Pile It’s a South African nightmare – being stranded on the side of the road with a flat tyre, or even worse, being involved in an accident far from home. Breakdown and emergency cover is increasingly being considered […]

Q&A Durban musical icon Roderick “Ricky” Stewart Gass has a passion for poetry, music and charity. His long and chequered career has taken him from a Durban orphanage into the police service of Rhodesia; from chart success and stadium fame back to Durban, where he now runs an animal welfare charity shop and plays music […]

CD of the week The Artist’s name was Prince, and he was funky. And then, due to a combination of legal problems and indiscriminate releases, he wasn’t. Since his dispute with former label WEA over the rights to album masters, his funkiness diminished even as his output increased. A new LP seemed to appear every […]

Frelimo leader Joaquim Chissano can expect to win Mozambique’s presidential election, but the Parliament poll is another matter, writes Chris McGreal Mozambique’s first freely elected Parliament spent four years wringing out a new Constitution. It was agreed that the flag, with its Kalashnikov and soviet star, would have to go, along with the national anthem. […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Police in the Eastern Cape are incapable of reaching crime-ridden villages because of bad roads in the impoverished province. Serious crimes like rape go unreported because communities are unable to get to police stations, which are mostly situated kilometres away from the remote areas. But this situation is expected to change […]

declining Your articles (November 19 to 25) about the problems in tertiary education should have mentioned the declining standards in the quality of people who are being appointed as professors in our universities, and the lack of any professional body that can punish them for misconduct. A case in point occurred recently in Pietermaritzburg. An […]

Shaun Harris TAKING STOCK There’s a deluge of investment advice available nowadays, so much that ordinary, individual investors probably feel a bit overwhelmed when considering where to put their spare funds. Much of this advice, however, is aimed at the institutions, particularly advice on equity investments. Stock market shares can be a great investment, but […]

Stephen Bierley Tennis In a few days men’s professional tennis will officially and triumphantly announce, in an attempt to enter the next millennium with something approaching a bang, that it has re-invented itself. Its top nine tournaments will be re- branded as a cohesive unit and its end-of- season tournament re-titled, while the ranking system […]

Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH There are certain glorious moments that define our common humanity. Such moments demonstrate vividly that despite our different colours, social backgrounds and geographical location, we can meld our disparate spirits together and fight for the survival of our beautiful planet. One such defining moment occurred in 1984/1985 when Bob […]

Alois Brunner sent at least 129 000 Jews to the death camps. Serge Klarsfeld, the French lawyer who helped track down Klaus Barbie, is determined to bring him to trial. Jo Glanville reports Many people remember Alois Brunner. Philip Vock saw him yelling in the yard of Drancy transit camp, on the outskirts of Paris, […]