living Expelled ANCleader Sifiso Nkabinde walks free on 18 charges of murder and the question is posed: who should be afraid this time? Ann Eveleth reports More than a dozen people died in KwaZulu-Natal hot spots within days of the acquittal of political wildcard Sifiso Nkabinde last Thursday. None of the deaths – one in […]

Chris Roper South African CD of the week The first words that the gravelly-voiced Arno Carstens croons on the opening track of The Springbok Nude Girls’ new CD, Omnisofa (Sony Music), are “we’re going to grow you up slowly”. It wouldn’t be too fanciful to imagine this as referring to the relationship between the band […]

Penny Siopis’s new show enacts a dialogue between beauty and cruelty, between private and public, writes Tracy Murinik Quietly, to Chopin, two breasts bathed in blood-red paint dip and resurface as if by lunar pull. Beautiful, and slightly comical, this video seems to engage in ambivalent dialogue with Queen Cakes, a pair of “cup-cake” breasts […]

Stephen Gray’s new poetry collection, his first in six years, has just come out. He spoke to Chris Dunton Your last collection, Season of Violence, appeared in 1992. Between that and the new volume, Gabriel’s Exhibition [Mayibuye], there’s quite a gap. Was there a break in your writing of poetry? To me Season of Violence […]

Andy Duffy The National Party’s new Western Cape leader, Gerald Morkel, played a central role in propelling a convict’s outlandish sex claims against NP chief Marthinus van Schalkwyk into the public domain. Morkel, provincial police MEC and now premier elect, was party to the decision to put senior investigators on to the case. His office […]

Tony Mechin As the leaders of the Zimbabwean Internet industry entered the Harare International conference centre in January for the opening of Internet@frica98, the country’s first Internet show, looming in their minds was the thought that the show billed as the “biggest Internet, intranet, cyber conference and exhibition in Southern Africa” was going to be […]

The National Party tabled a motion in the National Assembly this week (which, needless to say, was defeated) condemning our publication for what it described as an “untrue, vicious and malicious article in an attempt to smear the leader of the official opposition”. The motion was the latest in a series of attempts, mostly by […]

Women artists are taking control over their bodies and becoming overt exhibitionists. Joan Smith investigates Two women, two photographs. One shows a model in a dark tunic, her face turned blankly away from the camera, her raised hands holding apart the edges of a fur cape that frames the luminous V of her cleavage. In […]

Philip French Movie of the week The cinema has done quite well by Oscar Wilde’s work. There have been versions of Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger; a plush Alexander Korda film of An Ideal Husband; a superbly cast The Importance of Being Ernest with Edith Evans’s definitive Lady Bracknell; Albert Lewin’s […]

Catherine Knox Teenagers as young as 13 and 14 were treated for drug overdoses at last weekend’s annual Splashy Fen music festival, near Underberg, in KwaZulu-Natal. Dr Grant Lindsay, who has been providing emergency services at the festival for the past seven years, said he treated seven to 10 people a night for overdoses or […]