FRIDAY, 6.15PM: TRADING in the shares of Rand Merchant Bank, Southern Life Association, First National Bank Holdings and Momentum Life Holdings was suspended by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on Friday at the request of the comapnies’ boards. The suspension came as discussions of a merger between Anglo American and RMB’s financial interests progressed. The various […]

Ferial Haffajee In your ear With radio booming, the number of independent production houses is growing to titillate the ears and provide quality local radio. One of them is Wola Nani, an Aids- support organisation that has also produced a series of programmes on different aspects of living positively with the HIV virus. Other non-governmental […]

Nigeria Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka visited South Africa for a writers’ festival in Durban. He spoke to Suzy Bell A distinguished man in black sips a cold Amstel in the retro lounge of the Blue Waters Hotel in Durban. He’s Wole Soyinka, acclaimed playwright, essayist, novelist and memoirist. He’s the quietly spoken winner of the […]

FRIDAY, 6.00PM: SHARES on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange staged a late rally after a dull day on Friday, much to the consternation of dealers who were at a loss to explain the recovery. The all gold index slipped 2,1 points to 742,7. The industrial index rose 69,9 points to 8187,2, and the financial index, 103,3 […]

Dan Glaister in London He played a priest in True Confessions and the devil in Angel Heart, but these blasphemous associations did not stop the Vatican approaching Robert de Niro to ask him to contribute to a CD recording of the poems of Pope John Paul II. But now the invitation has been withdrawn. The […]

Chris Roper: On stage in Cape Town It’s a little weird that none of the press releases for Old Wicked Songs mention that one of its defining concerns is Jewish identity. It’s almost as if the PR is mimicking the actions of Stephen Hoffman, the young piano virtuoso played by Paul du Toit, when he […]

Andy Duffy, is truly muddle-headed. In his article “UWC debt collector’s deal”(February 13 to 19) he gets his story wrong in so many areas that I must wonder about his competence. Now for the facts: Professor Ikey van de Rheede was appointed as vice-rector (student affairs) by the broad-based process which the university adopted in […]

Njongonkulu Ndungane: UBUNTU When liberation came to South Africa in 1994, people rejoiced that at last there was freedom. Indeed, in the years just prior to the 1994 elections, we saw a surfeit of freedoms of expression that we had previously only known to exist in democracies like the United States. Not all these were […]

Andy Duffy Nine of the 10 deans at the University of Cape Town (UCT) are to be replaced as part of an aggressive affirmative action drive and management shake-up. The university is also putting all staff through rigorous performance checks, to weed out underachievers and free up posts for new black and female employees. All […]

Jack Schofield Plastic television and computer screens could be printed out by the yard using technology from Cambridge University and its development partner Seiko-Epson, a large Japanese manufacturer of computer printers. And because plastic screens can be flexible, TV sets could be hung on the wall and rolled up afterwards. The new screens are based […]