Zwelithini-ka Mvelase Frankly, if South Africans respected and preserved what’s theirs, with as much jealousy as Americans do, there would be enough greats to fill volumes. Whether those names were crooks or saints, wouldn’t matter a dime. This flits past my mind as I sit sipping gin with die ouens and – boom! – we […]
Mark Coetzee On show in Cape Town The art forms traditionally relegated to women and the manner in which these are produced have undergone radical change over the last decade. Judy Chicago with her The Dinner Party once and for all destroyed a categorization based on production associated to gender, and highlighted that the visual […]
Jonathan Miller reports on how the Internet has become a seething mass of fraud and disinformation Last month, media around the world picked up on the story that a teenage couple in the United States were preparing to lose their virginity live on the Internet. A special website had even been established to broadcast this […]
The mussel, a shellfish long known as a gourmet treat for the rich, has gained new significance for a community living in poverty on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast. For the people of Sokhulu, mussels are not a luxury, but a necessity – a valuable regular source of protein which keeps starvation at bay. Before 1996, […]
Alex Dodd This country has seen so many hundreds, so many thousands of bloody, gruesome, sicko murders one wonders what makes certain cases linger, like Lady Macbeth’s inescapably bloody hands, haunting the psyche of a nation. In the case of Charmaine Phillips and Peter Grundlingh, the couple tried for murdering four people between Durban and […]
Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon I must confess to feeling a bit ambivalent about Dr Nkosazana Zuma’s latest anti- smoking crusade. As a three-years-on ex-puffer, my wife assures me I have all but emptied my well of self- righteous reformist zeal. I now tend to let people get on with their tobacco undisturbed by pious sermonettes […]
at bay Ferial Haffajee It is a peaceful Saturday afternoon at a women’s shelter in the inner city in Johannesburg. Two women sit in the lounge and chat to a friend who is ironing. There is a calm about the place – it is here that battered women find refuge from abusive relationships and forge […]
As one of South Africa’s major outsider artists faces the loss of his unique Clarens homestead, Matthew Krouse and Alex Dodd journey to the source of a town’s painful conflict A Kafkaesque man in a black suit and tie flees across a surreal red landscape populated by creatures that could come from land or sea, […]
Michael Brooks As if you didn’t have enough to worry about already, it turns out that we’re 100-million years overdue for a mass extinction. Keep watching the skies if you want some warning. When you see an eerie blue glow, slightly bigger than a full moon, it means that you’ve got just a few days […]
James Sey The last week in July saw a flourish of high-profile events to launch the new University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Conceived of as a productive and market-related new way of approaching humanities and social science tertiary education, the graduate school is seen as the flagship of […]