Melvyn Minnaar Together with vineyard virtuosos like Gyles Webb of Thelema, Beyers Truter of Kanonkop and Norma Ratcliff of Warwick, a new generation of winemakers is gaining more and more attention. At Stellenzicht, originally almost a second label to Neethlingshof, a confident and sometime controversial Andr van Rensburg is making wines for a new era. […]

Black civil servants, traditional leaders and peasants are discovering Northern Province’s cheap source of labour, writes Mukoni T Ratshitanga Hundreds of Mozambican children are working in Northern Province households and on farms for as little as R150 a month. The child workers, some as young as 10, are employed across the province, from Madimbo near […]

Mungo Soggot documents the extraordinary history of the Liberian set to earn R3- million a year in South Africa’s oil industry The Liberian charged with reshaping South Africa’s state oil industry helped cream off millions from his country’s own oil business and had ties with a company which pumped oil into apartheid South Africa. Emanuel […]

From humble beginnings as a worker’s drink beer has become not only respectable, but hip, writes David Shapshak Lazy, hazy sun-filled days, beaches and bare flesh: these are the images that summer and beer conjure up – and rugby, let’s not forget where we are. But beer was once the little people’s drink, the common […]

Jackal The world’s most wanted man goes on trial next week after a career in terrorism lasting two decades. But, as Alex Duval Smith reports from Paris, what he might say in court has governments quaking The shot which for more than 20 years established him as the world’s most wanted man was fired in […]

The Mail & Guardian thanks all its (growing) band of readers for their patience during the present transformation that the newspaper is undergoing, and would like to announce some major new additions in the coming weeks. At the end of November we will be launching Frontiers, a new weekly science, technology and computer section that […]

Malian photographer Seydou Keta, now in his 70s and showing his work at the Johannesburg Biennale, tells his own story aI was born around 1921 in Bamako. I’m the oldest in a family of five children. When I was seven or eight, my father, Ba Tikoro, and my uncle Timoko began teaching me how to […]

Gwen Ansell : In your ear There’s probably now more jazz available on Gauteng radio than ever before. The community radio stations (Alex FM, Voice of Soweto) used to provide generous helpings – particularly of African jazz – until their managements went into advertiser-directed playlist mode and imported pop started squeezing it out. Some survive; […]

Opposition parties are preparing to use the death penalty to whip the ANC. Will the ANC be able to withstand the pressure, asks Marion Edmunds A political fight over the death penalty is brewing between the African National Congress and opposition parties – one in which ANC leadership finds itself at odds with majority opinion. […]

As international wines become collector’s items never to be drunk, Melvyn Minnaar wonders what’s happening in the local industry They’re tasted well enough, most likely from little tulip-shaped tasting glasses. But then they’re deftly ejected from the taster’s mouth into what has been known as a spittoon since Queen Victoria. The examiner moves on to […]