Peter Dickson Battered by bureaucratic bungling, the Eastern Cape government discovered this week that its expenditure has been technically illegal for the past six months. Owing to an “oversight” by Premier Makhenkesi Stofile, its 1998/99 provincial budget remains unpublished in the provincial Government Gazette, which is in contravention of the Constitution, In reply to a […]
season Mercedes Sayagues tries a popular Southern African aphrodisiac, but finds the side effects too hot to handle I tried wankie, and it works. But I don’t think I will try it again. Wankie (herbs, in seShona) is the generic word for traditional aphrodisiacs for women in Zimbabwe, but there are as many names as […]
Ben Laurance Share World It was Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty who created the precedent. “When I use a word,” he said, “it means exactly what I want it to mean – neither more nor less.” Now, 127 years after Through the Looking Glass was published, Alice has come to Wall Street. A hedge fund – […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Mpumalanga police have failed to trace a former Delmas mental patient who they say might help in the investigation of the beheading murders of at least four people. The police said Johannes Mohale- Monareng (alias Mohlala), who cut off a child’s head and tried selling it in 1990, was last seen at his […]
unit busted Chiara Carter Several senior National Intelligence Agency (NIA) members face suspension and possible prosecution following a preliminary investigation into claims of missing money and misconduct. They were members of a special unit set up to find apartheid’s missing millions. Instead the unit, headed by former Umkhonto weSizwe commander Thabo Kubu, became embroiled in […]
Tim Radford European scientists are to build an antimatter factory at Cern, the European nuclear research laboratory in Geneva. But even though antimatter would be the perfect fuel – 200 times more efficient than thermonuclear fusion – it may be some time before they have made enough to boldly go with Captain Kirk and Dr […]
Ferial Haffajee The chiefs in fatigues from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) jetted into Luanda this week to talk war. They could send soldiers to provide military assistance in Angola as the SADC did in the Democratic Republic of Congo last month and in Lesotho last week. The SADC’s new role is a triumph […]
Alexander Chancellor REMIND ME WHO I AM, AGAIN by Linda Grant (Granta) It is told in this book how Frankie Vaughan, the handsome crooner once thought to be England’s answer to Frank Sinatra, came to acquire his surname. His real name was Francis Abelson, and he lived as a child with his sister, his mother […]
CD of the week Adam Sweeting The idea that Brian Wilson could ever again approximate his own back- catalogue masterpieces has grown increasingly laughable. There was the critically-feted Orange Crate Art in 1995, but that was really a Van Dyke Parks project cunningly disguised as a Brian Wilson album. While it’s true that Wilson has […]
Anton Karstel’s Pol- aesthetic is an ambitious exploration of formal, aesthetic, spatial and temporal contingencies. The exhibition’s title puns tenuously on the aesthetic dimensions of socially and politically loaded iconography: the markings on police vehicles. These vehicles are represented through the “initial” spatio-temporal zone of this exhibition: the gallery space of Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre. Relinquishing […]