Lizeka Mda: CITY LIMITS Zoo Lake is 90 years old this year. Over time people have forgotten that the name of the park is Hermann Eckstein. Such is the city’s attachment to the murky water in the sunken lake. As a park it is not even up to scratch. If ever there was some deliberate […]
Shopping mall development in the townships is about to undergo a revival – thanks to Richard Maponya, reports Charlene Smith Shopping mall developments have, in the past, failed in townships because they were targeted at a race group rather than people, says township retail guru Richard Maponya. That is set to change, he believes. In […]
FRIDAY, 3.00PM: AN unbeaten 81 by Shaun Pollock, and poor slip catching by Roshan Mahanama, paved the way for South Africa to post a good first-innings total of 418 on the second day of the first Test against Sri Lanka at Newlands on Friday. Dropped by Mahanama when he had 25, Shaun Pollock lived on […]
Shaun de Waal If the English shortlist of this year’s M-Net Book Prize (announced this week in Cape Town) is anything to go by, South African novelists are still dealing with this country’s history, its national narrative, whether recent or more distant. Ken Barris’s novel The Jailer’s Book portrays an apartheid-era South Africa through the […]
Hackers use a great variety of techniques to break into private computer systems. John Graham-Cumming reports In a frenzy of announcements over the past few weeks, Nasa, the Pentagon, the United States Navy and a number of universities revealed that their computers were under cyber-attack. Many of the attacks relied on tried and tested hacking […]
Deborah Toler: A SECOND LOOK When Theodore Roosevelt visited sub-Saharan Africa in 1909, after he had already stepped down as United States president, he took an elephant gun and a team of taxidermists and brought home 512 animal specimens for the Smithsonian Institute. When President Bill Clinton – the first USpresident to visit this region […]
Chris Gordon and Ann Eveleth Zambia sent 500 troops to its border with Angola on Monday following persistent allegations that arms to Unita are being ferried across it. After months of denial that the border was porous, the Zambian government this week finally agreed to take action. The agreement, announced by Zambian foreign minister Keli […]
Martin Kettle in Washington The city of Louisville in Kentucky boasts possibly the world’s only statue of Louis XVI of France – in honour of the man from whom it takes its name. It is doubly odd to find a statue of the last of the Bourbons in the middle of a mid-western state becau […]
The Time of the Writer festival was recently held at Natal University. South African author Farida Karodia was there Monday In the afternoon Nigeria’s Nobel winner Wole Soyinka, British author Barbara Trapido, Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera and Breyten Breytenbach, there since Sunday, drift into the lounge. Some of the writers on the programme have not turned […]
I find myself sitting next to Mike Atherton as the England cricket team crowds on to a small plane leaving Guyana for the next Test in Barbados. He is reading the memoirs of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from Chile. Atherton is also impressively familiar with Guyanese literature and mentions the recent death of […]