FRIDAY, 5.00PM: THOUSANDS of Rwandans gathered in the capital Kigali to witness the execution of four people convicted of inciting acts of genocide in the 1994 massacre of almost a million Tutsis. Another 18 prisoners were executed by firing squad in four other outlying towns. Preparations for the executions of three men and one women […]
Lynda Gledhill Sitting in a luxury hotel dressed in brightly coloured clothes, Ester Mujawayo does not exude the air of a woman whose life has been destroyed. But this Tutsi from Rwanda is one of the few survivors in her family of the genocide that gripped her country in 1994. For a month, Mujawayo, her […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi African National Congress politicians have allegedly taken a direct hand in a disciplinary hearing against an SABC journalist. The hearing is threatening relations between junior staffers and senior managers at the SABC, where three trade unions have vowed to act against any victimisation. At the centre of the tensions are allegations that Northern […]
Mail & Guardian reporter The crusading journalist John Pilger set a cat among the pigeons of South African complacency this week with his hour-long documentary Apartheid Did Not Die, on what he represented as a betrayal of the liberation cause by the African National Congress. The documentary was broadcast in prime-time by the SABC, but […]
grant Wonder Hlongwa KwaZulu-Natal Premier Ben Ngubane’s office says it is going ahead with a R5-million grant to an anti-crime scheme managed by controversial double agent Mohammed Amin Laher – alias Mark Todd – in spite of Laher’s murky past. Laher, who is under investigation for alleged fraud, assault and misrepresenting his identity, featured prominently […]
Andy Duffy A senior academic at the University of the Witwatersrand is poised to resign over his involvement in a publicly listed technology company. Professor Hanoch Neishlos, chair of the computer science department at Wits, and his wife own shares in the company that are currently worth more than R100-million. The company’s main product is […]
The discovery of vast stretches of water between the stars has raised new questions about the origins of life on Earth, writes Tim Radford European scientists, using an ultra-cold orbiting telescope, have discovered unimaginable volumes of water in the space between the stars. The discovery raises new questions about life elsewhere in the universe -and […]
The Discovery Channel will show films made by South Africans in its upcoming South African Visions series, reports Janet Smith Isicathamiya is not only about singing in perfect harmony, wearing white gloves and a three-piece suit. It is also about heartbreak and love and survival, as viewers in the process of re-educating themselves about this […]
Irwin Manoim In the paranoid final years of the PW Botha regime, the government had two tasks. The first was to suppress dissent; the second was to pretend there was no dissent. The latter, perhaps the more difficult task, fell to Stoffel Botha, former minister of home affairs, who died this week aged 67. It […]
At 82, Penelope Fitzgerald is the first non- American to win a United States national critics’ prize. She spoke to Peter Lennon There was something patronising about the pleasure with which the British media reported how modest and surprised Penelope Fitzgerald, aged 82, was at winning the American National Book Critics’ Circle fiction award, the […]