Roger Southall A Second Look Your correspondent William Boot is being incautious in suggesting that Lesotho’s May election was rigged by the ruling Lesotho Congress of Democrats (LCD) (“Lesotho’s election farce”, August 7 to 13). A more careful look at the election is required. Preparations for the election began under the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Pretoria It is really only while I am hurtling along the highway back to Johannesburg from the Pretoria State Theatre that the full effect of Reza de Wet’s latest work, Yelena, begins to sink in. A leading South African playwright based in Grahamstown, De Wet has chosen to continue her […]
Many of our readers will find the pictures of famine in southern Sudan which we have published deeply distressing. Some may feel that this is a visual invasion of privacy which should not be allowed. Others may wonder whether such appeals to our consciences are not just a short-term palliative: is there not a better […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Goma | Friday 1.00PM. WITH panic growing in Kinshasa, rebel troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo are reported to have advanced as far as Kasangulu, some 30km south-west of the capital. Rebel leaders in Goma said Kinshasa is now in their sights, and will fall by the end of the month, if […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Friday 5.00pm. JUSTICE Minister Dullah Omar has said that the the transformation of the judiciary must be speeded up. Speaking on Friday after the week’s outcry over the handling of the SA Rugby Football Union’s successful application to have a commission of inquiry overturned, Omar said the judiciary’s accountability should […]
up Howard Barrell Over a Barrel While in exile with the African National Congress in Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s, I had a simple test to decide who I felt comfortable with. It was: can this person appreciate a good anti-ANC joke? If yes, the likelihood was we could work together. If not, co-operation was doubtful. […]
ROB DAVIES, Johannesburg | Friday 10.30AM. TWO more South African athletes have won gold medals at the World Athletics Championships for the Physically Disabled in Birmingham, bringing the number of gold medals won to five. Malcolm Pringle, winner of three medals at the Atlanta Paralympics in 1996, won the 1500m class 38 cerebral palsy event […]
Justin Arenstein President Nelson Mandela has ordered the country’s top investigator, Judge Willem Heath, to probe a land deal involving South Africa’s outspoken ambassador to Mozambique and former homeland strongman, Mangisi Zitha. The controversial deal allowed Zitha to buy a 5,7ha farm with two houses in the former KaNgwane homeland in 1991 for just R5 […]
The surest sign of China’s remarkable economic success was when President Jiang Zemin traded his Mao Zedong suit for Giorgio Armani and became the Gordon Gecko of Asia. Like his fictional movie-tycoon counterpart, Jiang’s slogan could be “greed is good”. Under his guidance China has become an economic powerhouse with stock markets that would make […]
Suzy Bell One of South Africa’s most highly rated political cartoonists, Nanda Soobben, has just scooped a handsome grant from the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology to produce a 20-minute docu-animation film, based on his political cartoons from the Eighties and Nineties. Soobben, who is a weekly political cartoonist forThe Independent on Saturday […]