Melvyn Minnaar : Potable pleasures Tradition has been trashed. That’s the general view – not only in Matieland, Melville and Malmesbury, but also in Mozambique – of the terrible Tassenberg Tragedy. The most famous and best-selling red wine in our country has been bastardised. Tassenberg’s label tells a new, sad truth: the contents in the […]

Andy Duffy Awaiting-trial prisoners are being held at CMax, raising fresh concerns about the rules prison officials follow before putting people into the controversial hi- tech jail. At least 10 suspects have been placed in the maximum security unit since Christmas, and police have played an influential role in the decision to use CMax to […]

Bongani Siqoko: Soccer When the new national soccer team caretaker coach Matsilele Jomo Sono named his squad for the Confederation of Southern African Football Associations (Cosafa) Cup match against Namibia in Windhoek on Friday, one player whose call-up was long overdue is Mamelodi Sundowns defender Themba Mnguni. Mnguni has been awaiting the call-up since the […]

By Sechaba ka’Nkosi People’s power without the gravy train When the new African National Congress deputy secretary general, Thenjiwe Mtintso, was asked last month what her ambitions in the party were, her answer was simple: “I would like to see our slogan, ‘All power to the people’, implemented in reality.” This may sound mundane, the […]

Stefaans Brummer and Mungo Soggot The law professor who guided the academic career of Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga and became a close friend had strong intelligence links and served as a front man for Renamo, the notorious Mozambican rebel movement backed by apartheid’s security establishment. Professor André Thomashausen, a constitutional law expert based at Unisa, […]

Martin Walker in Brussels A surreal war has broken out in Belgium as veterans of a revolutionary art movement rally against an arts festival in honour of the surrealist master René Magritte. The retrospective, to mark his centenary, is being billed by others as the biggest cultural event in Europe this year. The Belgian state […]

set It took 15 minutes to expose a wannabe legend of her time as merely a legend in her own mind, reports Hazel Friedman A pseudo-American accent, liberal dropping of Hollywood’s hottest names, a surplus of arrogance and extreme delusions of grandeur. That was all it took for con- artist Tracey Morrison to infiltrate the […]

Madeleine Wackernagel He’s not exactly Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch, but William Kirsh (36) is certainly following the global trend. This week’s announcement that Primedia, a listed company worth R2,5-billion, is forming separate music and film divisions is another step to realising his ambition of becoming South Africa’s own media mogul. The rationale is simple: […]

Aspasia Karras While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same. Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites. Local government is […]