Too often South Africa’s transitional government has been held up as a model for other countries undergoing profound political change. Usually wrongly. But this country does offer a good example to Nigeria as its military regime gropes its way in the wake of the deaths of former dictator Sani Abacha and the man elected president […]
Graham Farmelo Only the most foolhardy person would try to predict the future of the World Wide Web, but that didn’t stop its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, from trying some crystal-ball gazing last week. During Internet, Web, What Next?, a conference at the Cern atom-smasher laboratory in Geneva, Berners-Lee and others speculated on what they hoped […]
Lauren Shantall To reach Heart of Darkness, one must embark on a symbolic journey into the bowels of the hulking 1820 Settlers Monument. There, one will confront an Africa of the past – that mythical place of the European imagination – and the multi-dimensional Africa of the present day. Finally, one encounters the minds of […]
Shaun de Waal It is, in my opinion, the best magazine in the country. Maybe I feel like that about SL magazine because about ten years ago I was involved in starting a magazine of South African “alternative” culture. It was short- lived. But things have changed enormously in the last decade. Rulers aside, what […]
Bram Posthumus: FIRST PERSON In the full moonlight, a dozen young men were standing around our car, its front wheels jammed solid in the mud. One shouted the now familiar command: “Leggo! Leggo!”, Liberian English for “Heave!” The men grunted, the engine roared and the car finally sped away, leaving the small group covered in […]
Arizona North America is home to literally dozens of active stock exchanges, from the continent’s oldest in Philadelphia to Canada’s premier market place in Toronto. If you prefer something offbeat, there are the frozen floors of the Alberta Stock Exchange in Canada’s great white north or the arid airs of the little-known Arizona Stock Exchange. […]
Nick Paul, resplendent in designer khaki, gets lost in tent town and discovers the Durban July is little more than a freak show July day sits in the middle of Durban’s social calendar like a large, clever, sharp-tongued Berea matron with a fine mind and too much time on her hands. Everyone wants to be […]
Anthony Egan THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN SURFACE by Kate Turkington (Penguin) Historians, philosophers and even a few theologians have frequently declared the death of God and the end of religion. Yet today we see a religious resurgence on almost all fronts: pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity, often militant Islam, renewed interest in the occult, New […]
Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL There are, I’m sure, many reasons to admire communists. One which dwarfs all others, though, is their talent for rationalisation. Their ability to explain away past failures in such a way as to be able to retain a set of ill-fitting core beliefs is quite remarkable. The origin of this […]
Five lucky Friday readers can each win a set of five volumes in the recently relaunched Oxford World’s Classics series -Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. All […]