Jeremy Cronin: CROSSFIRE Jonathan Steinberg’s ”The ‘mysterious’ decline of the left” (May 8 to 14) is a useful antidote to some of the recent excesses of John Pilger. What Steinberg dwells upon, what Pilger neglected, is that the South African transition is occurring in a world very different from the first two-and-half decades after World […]
Richard Williams Not quite movie of the week In Ulysses Jackson, a taciturn grandfather who keeps bees in the swamps of the Florida panhandle, the writer and director Victor Nunez has created one of the richest movie roles of the decade. And in Peter Fonda he has found the ideal actor. Ulee’s Gold is a […]
Students at South African universities are planning a major expedition into Africa in the hopes of recovering lost knowledge about the continent.
THURSDAY, 9.15AM: THE National Sports Council lifted the ban on international rugby tours to South Africa amid scenes of jubilation in Johannesburg on Wednesday evening. After lengthy meetings with the South African Rugby Football Union’s executive and the 14 provincial rugby unions, the NSC announced that proposed tours by England, Wales and Ireland will go […]
THURSDAY, 6.30PM: THE Presidential Review Commission on Thursday said in a report that it appears the leadership of the Northen Province and the Eastern Cape have been bogged down by the enormity of the challenges facing their provinces. The PRC also admitted that the problems may be much more complex than they had appeared at […]
THURSDAY, 11.00AM: THE National Party lost 81% of its 1995 vote to lose 1419-386 to the Democratic Party in the Brakpan by-election on Wednesday. The winning candidate was the DP’s Shelly Loe, who defeated the NP’s Malcolm Laing in a 31% poll. On Tuesday, the DP won a clear victory in former NP bastion Bergvliet/Meadowridge […]
TUESDAY, 7.00PM: THE Council for Nuclear Safety is worried by rapid development near Cape Town’s Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, and says it must be brought under control. Further development could create enormous difficulties should an emergency evacuation of Koeberg ever become necessary, council general manager Jeff Leaver told the Minerals and Energy parlimentary committee on […]
Andy Duffy The National Party’s new Western Cape leader, Gerald Morkel, played a central role in propelling a convict’s outlandish sex claims against NP chief Marthinus van Schalkwyk into the public domain. Morkel, provincial police MEC and now premier elect, was party to the decision to put senior investigators on to the case. His office […]
Stephen Gray’s new poetry collection, his first in six years, has just come out. He spoke to Chris Dunton Your last collection, Season of Violence, appeared in 1992. Between that and the new volume, Gabriel’s Exhibition [Mayibuye], there’s quite a gap. Was there a break in your writing of poetry? To me Season of Violence […]
Penny Siopis’s new show enacts a dialogue between beauty and cruelty, between private and public, writes Tracy Murinik Quietly, to Chopin, two breasts bathed in blood-red paint dip and resurface as if by lunar pull. Beautiful, and slightly comical, this video seems to engage in ambivalent dialogue with Queen Cakes, a pair of “cup-cake” breasts […]