Swapna Prabhakaran If tigers could speak, they’d sound just like Tim Modise and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton. Their laidback voices resonate around the studio in a half-purr, half-growl hinting at claws and teeth, and the very sharp intelligence of jungle cats. Modise – an old familiar on SAfm – has teamed up with the BBC’s Quist-Arcton to […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg It seems to me there are two particularly compelling reasons to stage a tribute to Gibson Kente in 1998. In the first place, it’s about bloody time. We need, for the record, to preserve a body of work such as Kente’s in case we forget. Secondly, it’s a rare […]
Emeka Nwandiko As South African companies struggle to fill high-flying posts they are increasingly relying on executive recruitment agencies – better known as headhunters – to fill the gap. Crime is the reason most often given for the outflow of mainly white senior executives from South Africa since 1994. The Central Statistical Service notes that […]
Krisjan Lemmer There has been much excitement in the Groot Marico – protests in the back room of the Dorsbult Bar, resolutions calling the volk to arms, death threats etc etc – over reported plans to remove Paul Kruger’s name from South Africa’s biggest game park. In the end calmer heads prevailed and the burghers […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Like President Nelson Mandela, Gaaitsiwe “Conka” Rakuba is a veteran prisoner who celebrated 27 Christmases behind bars. But he was jailed for different reasons. Rakuba (42) is a career prisoner: he first went to jail in 1970 and since then hadn’t spent more than three months “outside”, until his release last year. This […]
Once a vibrant part of the Soweto arts scene, the Funda Centre has had to adapt. Swapna Prabhakaran finds out how It is a sad fact that Soweto’s Funda Centre is better known internationally than it is in Johannesburg. The once-famous centre for literacy and the arts has transformed in the Nineties to become a […]
Claire Robertson Jacques Pauw once wrote of Ferdi Barnard that his head “hopped like a rubber ball on his broad shoulders” while he smoked a crack cocaine pipe and confessed to killing Dr David Webster. That was some three years ago, when Barnard – a convicted killer, former narcotics policeman and dirty-tricks operative – was […]
Appearance masked disappearance and death in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Nothing was how it seemed. Nigel Fountain reports on the photos that hid dirty deeds One photograph in The Commissar Vanishes is of two men playing chess in the sunshine of Capri. It is April 1908. Alexander Bogdanov, later to found the Soviet Union’s first blood […]
Suzy Bell Six guitarists, all fluent in French – yet decidedly South African. Doctors, artists, teachers, a lawyer and a sailor – a Durban writers’ circle. Over a year, every two weeks, they met in caf,s, restaurants and private homes to mull over words, sip whisky, write and rewrite until they created Unwrapped – irreverent […]
FRIDAY, 8.30AM: LOW-KEY Gerald Morkel became the most powerful coloured person in the National Party when he defeated his flamboyant opponent Peter Marais on Thursday night to become party leader in the Western Cape, the last remaining NP stronghold. But Morkel’s first few hours of power gave him little chance to savour his success: First, […]