The University of Pretoria’s celebrated Van Tilburg collection may have been stolen from Dutch Jews, writes Bart Luirink In 1951 Jacob van Tilburg, a Dutch art collector, managed to transfer 91 cases with valuable art pieces to South Africa – a remarkable effort for somebody who, three years earlier, had been sentenced for collaboration with […]
Charlene Smith Outside a Johannesburg court, a policeman and private investigators compare notes before testifying at a trial of a major criminal syndicate. The policeman’s original notes came from the private investigators, who in turn were contracted by major medical aid firms to investigate millions of rands worth of fraud. As soon as they came […]
A new treatment for male impotence is taking the world by storm, writes Tim Radford Lewis Carroll should have patented the idea: swallow a little something and feel just swell. “I know something interesting is sure to happen,” said Alice when she found the bottle. “I hope it will make me grow large again, for […]
Alex Dodd On show in Johannesburg He thinks it was Andy Warhol who said it. Something like, if you can’t appreciate the beauty in a Coke can what’s the point of being alive right now? “You’ve got to be able to appreciate the beauty in the world around you – just the way it is,” […]
The squatter invasion that swept Cape Town housing officials into the high court this week comes against a backdrop of delayed, scrapped or crippled low-cost housing projects around the city. Latest council figures show that nearly R30-million of the R46,2-million the city council had earmarked for priority housing projects for the year to June 1998 […]
Simon Caulkin reports on the bright young masters of the Web universe This year $20-billion of business will be done on the Internet. That’s about the size of the economy of Vietnam or Iraq, and three times the figure for economic commerce, or e-commerce, last year. By 2000 the total may be five or even […]
Wally Mbhele Despite the succession of adventurous military operations he has been associated with, Aboobaker Ismail is an intensely private person – so private that he is still more commonly known by his nom de guerre, Rasheed. It was during his tenure as an Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) commander that he became one of the previous […]
Andy Capostagno John Robbie is fond of saying, “There are only two kinds of people in the world. The Irish and people who wish they were Irish”. I found myself pondering those words while watching Catriona McKiernan burst from the pack, chase the leaders, reel them in and finally trot home in glorious isolation to […]
The Wild Coast SDI is setting local communities against each other, report Thembela Kepe, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ben Cousins Simmering beneath the surface of the Wild Coast Spatial Development Initiative (SDI), announced with great fanfare last month, are conflicts and tensions that could blow the much- vaunted investment initiative sky high. In some areas a […]
Stefaans Brmmer Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga shares a business empire with an apartheid-era military intelligence agent who was also a key backer in Motshekga’s bitterly contested campaign last year for the provincial throne. Abel Rudman’s military intelligence cover was blown in 1991 when the then Weekly Mail revealed that an anti-African National Congress newspaper he […]