In his first column for Smart Money, David Gleason surveys gold and wonders why Barlow sold investment company PGM for so little Is this a good time to buy gold shares? The evidence supporting the view that gold may be on the verge of a better period (not fantastic, you understand, just modestly better than […]

Howard Barrell The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was ready to declare FW de Klerk “an accessory to gross human rights violations” before the former president brought an urgent court action to stop this conclusion being carried in the TRC’s final report, released in Pretoria on Thursday. The commission had provisionally concluded that De Klerk’s […]

Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH She never allowed the leaders of the Soviet Union to forget what horrible creatures they were. And she plotted, with her “virtual boyfriend”, Ronald Reagan, to bring down the Soviets’ “evil empire”. To listen to her waxing lyrical about the “values of the free world” you would have thought […]

Things are changing at Nasa. In October it saw the launch of a spacecraft with an engine that thunders with all the force of a small piece of paper resting on your hand. But, according to researchers working on the mission, the almost imperceptible thrust of this ion drive could be the key to the […]

Loose cannon: Robert Kirby It is never quite possible to store up enough cynicism for use as a protective membrane between oneself and advertising. Membrane be damned, these days you need armour-plating to keep the witness of the creative directors, the visualisers and the rest of the snake-oil salesmen from getting through to you. It […]

`Woza Friday, my darling!” went the chorus from a traditional song by migrant workers in the olden days. Emerging from their miserable underground life they only looked forward to two things – traditional food, and rest. With no African eateries on the mines, they prepared their sumptuous African meals themselves. These included umgodu (tripe), samp, […]

Stuart Hess A student at Peninsula Technikon, Max Hamata, has received death threats for writing a story on campus prostitution for the Mail & Guardian. Technikon management has also placed pressure on him to reveal his sources. After the article, “Sex for sale on campus”, appeared on September 18, Hamata was harassed and verbally abused […]

Friday night: Martin Nel I had intended spending my weekend club- hopping, and was psyching up for (some) Therapy in Braamies, and was crossing Rockey Street in Yeoville when I got highjacked by Tony from Rockerfellas, bursting to show me his new club in Picadilly Centre, for “black queers”. His last statement confused me, but […]

smoke Mungo Soggot The National Intelligence Agency (NIA)destroyed key state documents as late as November 1996, complementing the wholesale destruction of state records undertaken by the previous government from 1990. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC)final report says in a section on South Africa’s gutted archive that the NIA destroyed records from the intelligence services […]

orphans David Gough in Kigali Clarissa Uwizcyimana last saw her son Kofi in December 1996, in the squalid refugee camp in eastern Congo where they had taken shelter two years earlier from the civil war and genocide raging in their native Rwanda. She had gone in search of food when a gunfight broke out between […]