THURSDAY, 5.00PM LOCAL markets closed on Thursday without recovering from the morning’s crash, to record the biggest single-day fall on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange since the crash of October 1987. The industrial index closed 355 points lower at 8 682, and the all share index shed 326 points to close on 7 094. The financial […]

White farmers are convinced that renegade armed guerrillas are behind the recent rash of murders in rural areas, reports Justine Nofal John Biedge is a livestock farmer in the Eastern Cape and chair of the Maclear District Farmer’s Union, which represents an area comprising about 60 farms. On October 6 he faxed a list of […]

Brett Bailey’s play, iMumbo Jumbo, is putting a new slant on South African theatre. Janet Smith reports Everything about Brett Bailey shrieks didgeridoo-blowing, teepee-weekending white boy who’s managed to coil his tongue around a Xhosa click and thinks he’s in heaven. There’s something so flea-market fey about his short knitted waistcoat, small knitted cap and […]

Economic reality has derailed plans to build the Wild Coast toll road, writes Craig Bishop Less than two weeks before an important international investors’ conference in East London on the Wild Coast spatial development initiative (SDI), the government is learning its development lessons the hard way. The Department of Transport has shelved plans to construct […]

Na’eem Jeenah Nelson Mandela’s statement “I am the master of my own fate”, and his accusation that the Americans are arrogant and dull, resonate as the truth to many South Africans. As a sovereign nation, South Africa cannot simply accede to the demands of the world’s superpower and ditch those which supported its struggle for […]

Emeka Nwandiko Street hawkers in Johannesburg are threatening to “cleanse the streets” of foreign traders whom they blame for disease and decay. Amid chants of “chase the makwere-kwere out” and “down with the foreigner, up with South Africans” a 500-strong crowd of informal traders toyi-toyied to the Department of Home Affairs in Johannesburg on Wednesday. […]

Sechaba ka’Nkosi Intense pressure from the government and less enthusiasm for mass action are believed to be behind the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s (Cosatu) sudden change of attitiude on the Basic Conditions of Employment Bill this week, and a possible settlement before the Bill is tabled in Parliament next week. Cosatu’s woes began […]

Gauteng will be using a space map to plot its future urban growth and manage its resources, writes Aspasia Karras In the drive to confirm Gauteng’s status as the “smart province”, it has come to grips with the digital age and is now using snappy automated products to deliver its vision of “growth for all”. […]

Modern art has found a new home in a space- age museum that has risen amid the urban sprawl of a Spanish port. Robert McCrum visited the Bilbao Guggenheim If, as a native of Bilbao, you had happened to see a balding, middle-aged American in trainers and sweatpants jogging past the Jesuit university along the […]

Thousands of people across the country are building their own homes, writes Ferial Haffajee Whizzing south on the Golden Highway out of Johannesburg, newly built houses seem a sad symbol of the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Hundreds of new houses stand like lonely soldiers, watching over a development dream that seems to have gone wrong. […]