Pat McDermott : Cricket Australia in Australia are, as any touring team who has visited the home of sledging, the hand-held frosty and unremitting competitiveness on the field of play will tell you, remains a cricketing journey beyond the reach of the faint-hearted or the foolhardy. And while Hansie Cronje’s South Africans approach their 11-week […]

Andy Duffy Independent investigators in the North West province are probing alleged irregularities in education department contracts worth more than R130-million. The contracts include a massive school textbook order, where half the books never reached the schools, and irregularities in at least two Reconstruction and Development Programme education schemes in the province. The investigation, ordered […]

SUHARTO TO GET TOP HONOURVISITING Indonesian President, Mohamed Suharto, is to receive South Africa’s highest honour, the Order of Good Hope, at a special ceremony at President Nelson Mandela’s residence this weekend. The award-ceremony will be Suharto’s last stop in South Africa before he leaves for Cananda on Saturday. Last month the award was given […]

Iden Wetherell The collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar and pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have forced President Robert Mugabe’s government to disclose how it intends to fund the substantial payouts it has promised veterans of the country’s liberation war. But it is unlikely that this week’s announcement of far-reaching budgetary revisions and drastic […]

Andrew Muchineripi : Soccer On a cold, wet evening in the industrial heartland of Germany the inevitable happened last weekend with the champions of Europe showing the champions of Africa just how wide the gap is between the continents on the football field. Bafana Bafana apologists have made much of their understrength team, conveniently forgetting […]

Janet Smith In a cyber world, girls are not necessarily made of sugar and spice and all things nice, nor do virtual crocodiles necessarily eat them smeared in caramel. But Codi (see cover picture), with her Fifth Element bob and her hot-stuff lycra playwear, is as spunky as good girls from reality are sweet. Born […]

Jonathan Romney New music Four months ago, Robert Wyatt became a grandfather at the age of 52, and it’s fair to say that the role suits him down to the ground. He has the right beard for the part, and he makes the kind of music you’d rather hope a grandfather would make – melancholic, […]

Uganda is a nation numbed by past atrocities. But, despite a booming economy, the hard times are not over yet. Matthew Engel reports On alternate evenings, everyone’s electricity is switched off for up to four hours at a time. North of the capital there is a savage war going on. There is another one to […]

Madeleine Wackernagel : Taking Stock Everybody’s talking about it – globalisation, that is. And everyone, apparently, is part of the new economic paradigm. There are exceptions, of course, but apart from a few retrograde isolationists, the world is one great big, happy market. We’ve been here before: globalisation is simply a new term for an […]