Mercedes Sayagues Controversial American entrepreneur James Blanchard has set his sights on including parts of the famed Inhaca island in his huge Mozambican theme park, despite the fact that he has yet to deliver on his grandiose scheme. Blanchard has asked the Maputo municipal council for a 276ha concession in Ponta Torres, the south-eastern peninsula […]

Larry Elliott It is just before dawn in Kinshasa on October 30 1974. In a boxing ring in the middle of a football stadium lies George Foreman, knocked out by Muhammad Ali in one of the biggest sporting upsets of the century. As lightning crackles overhead, 60 000 Zaireans cheer Ali, world champion again after […]

Dan Ncayiyana Right to Reply I feel constrained to respond to the letter by my friend and colleague, Professor Cecil Abrahams (May 8 to 14), in which he purports to write “in my capacity as an acknowledged scholar of African studies”. Whatever that distinction may mean (I am not aware of an academic discipline called […]

Lizeka Mda: CITY LIMITS The traffic on Jan Smuts Avenue is crawling at a snail’s pace on Friday morning. Oxford Road is no better. So what else is new? To the traffic chaos on its doorstep, the Park Hyatt hotel at the corner of Oxford and Biermann Avenue in Rosebank presents an inscrutable face of […]

Martin Kettle in Washington The United States has discovered a fashionable new writer, and his name is Norman Mailer. Mailer was on the front pages of the New York Times and USA Today last week. He has done a television interview with American breakfast television’s flagship show. All this is because he has published a […]

Mark Tran `People laughed at us when we told them that Yahoo! would be worth more than Netscape – `they’re just a bunch of kids’, we were told,” recalls Andrew Nibley, president of Reuters New-Media, a subsidiary of the British news group created in 1994 to position the company for the Internet age. Nibley, who […]

Mukoni T Ratshitanga Police and home affairs officials in Mpumalanga and the Northern Province are deporting large numbers of former Mozambican refugees despite a 1996 Cabinet resolution that gave them citizenship, according to reports from the provinces. Last week 120 former refugees were arrested in Giyani while travelling to work, says Nicola Johnston of the […]

David Cesarani ISRAEL: A HISTORY by Martin Gilbert (Doubleday, R219,95) Israel’s 50th birthday celebrations are in disarray, a muddle produced by fiscal stringency and ideological confusion. Plans for costly, symbolic events have been scrapped amidst popular apathy. According to the Jerusalem Report, “There’s little sense of unity, and not really much agreement on what it […]

Mukoni T Ratshitanga The National Party lost three municipal by-elections to the Democratic Party this week, indicating that the party’s support base among white South Africans is crumbling and raising questions about its future. The NP polled 22,3% in its traditional stronghold of Bergvliet in the Western Cape – 48 hours after Gerald Morkel was […]

Chris Roper The saga of censorship at Stellenbosch University took a new turn last week when students exhibiting at the university’s gallery took down their work because the show had been tampered with. A triptych by Mark Coetzee, featuring erect penises, was removed from the exhibition by Professor Greg Kerr, head of the Stellenbosch art […]