Suzy Bell On show in Durban There’s a mighty fine poetic clerk working in the corporation department in Durban, whose head is a-swim with splicing Strauss, Shakespeare, Mozart and Milton, together with baubles and beads collected from Las Vegas, Paris and Durban. He is performance artist Vernon Burns, who has designed eight highly operatic costumes […]

Brenda Atkinson Multimedia The world of William Kentridge is one of considerable public profile, prolific artistic production, and enigmatic private symbolism. South Africa’s most acclaimed artist, his conceptual and aesthetic sensibilities have brought him growing critical kudos over the decades. But despite his international ubiquity, Kentridge remains something of a dark horse. Reserved in interviews […]

Richard Jago Tennis Martina Hingis made tennis history in a meteoric rise to the top of the women’s game. At the start of the year she led the rankings by 3E000 points and her position as number one seemed impregnable. Then in May she lost to Anna Kournikova in Berlin – and cracks began to […]

Anthony Holiday Over a Barrel The secret malaise is no longer concealable. Its symptoms are manifest everywhere from conclaves in Cape Town to the conflict in the Congo. South Africa’s Department of Foreign Affairs – and hence also Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and President Nelson Mandela himself – are taking decisions and engaging in the […]

Peter Makurube Live in Johannesburg The annual Jazz on the Lake festival is back and the organisers are hoping to beat their own record of 30E0000 revellers. Too bad, however, because the park is becoming too small for people to enjoy music. The public toilets can’t cope. The music comes first and the audience prefers […]

cash Insurance companies are paying claims in vouchers rather than cash, writes Ferial Haffajee The trauma of being mugged, having your car stolen or house broken into can be assuaged by the thought that if you’re fully insured, you should soon be getting a payout to replace your lost belongings. But when you lodge an […]

Shaun de Waal CD of the week Between 1973 and 1980, Tom Waits made seven albums for Asylum Records. From those works were selected and collected the songs that appeared on his previous “best of”, conveniently tagged The Asylum Years. You could hear, over those albums, the transformation of someone who was always an unusual […]

Nicholas Dawes Parties in Cape Town `Fuck dance, let’s art” is something like a family motto for the hip UK record label Ninja Tune, and it was unsurprising to find it on a flyer for Friday’s SEXsmorgasbord party at the similarly hip Take Four Bistro. This may seem an unlikely manifesto from the people responsible […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Lusaka | Friday 4.30pm. ZAMBIAN Home Affairs Minister Peter Machungwa on Friday threatened to arrest the leaders of a newly formed movement of gays and lesbians should they try to register the association. Homosexuality is a felony which carries a a minimum prison sentence of 14 years in Zambia and is, Machungwa explained, […]

Moulded into the plastic soles of my father’s bedroom slippers were the words: “Man-made Materials.” As a child, I pondered that phrase for years. What, exactly, is a man-made material? Where did “man” get the stuff he “made” it from? And if he got it from somewhere and merely melted it down with something else, […]