LOOSE CANNON: Robert Kirby BOTH of my liberal friends have again gone into moral shock. This recent disaffection is no result of conventional stimuli. It has a more specific aetiology than the vaguely defined silts of the apartheid system. These two people are disturbed for very compact reasons. They have been watching and listening to […]

Muting the instruments Previous Grahamstown jazz festivals have usually been followed by one South African musician or another sounding off to the press. In the past, artists have had gripes about pay, conditions and programming. This year, you heard none of that; we can guarantee it. But the post-festival silence doesn’t mean that everything in […]

ATHLETICS:Julian Drew FOR Frits Potgieter it was never a matter of if but rather when he would break into the big time – and that moment arrived somewhat unceremoniously at a low key athletics meeting in Sheffield, England on Tuesday night. Potgieter added more than two metres to his previous personal best of 61.98m in […]

The truth commission will examine whether judges `dished out death sentences’ to shore up apartheid, writes Swapna Prabhakaran SOME of South Africa’s judges, including one working for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, will be called before the commission to defend apartheid-era decisions to send hundreds of people to the gallows. The issue of the death […]

PRESIDENT Nelson Mandela chose to speak at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies during his brief visit last week to the United Kingdom in order to make good his debt to religious leaders who had contributed to the struggle against apartheid.

Five years on, New York State police have not found the killer of a South African university student, writes his brother, Phil Molefe THE world media descended on Cape Town like vultures last week to cover the amnesty hearing of slain American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl. By contrast, nothing has ever been said in America […]

Fencing may have originated with the European aristocracy, but now it is flourishing in Mamelodi township FENCING: Julian Drew NOT so many years ago no black man without the speed of Hezekiel Sepeng would have ventured on to the Pretoria University campus inquiring whether he could join in with the sporting activities. A slower individual […]

In the week that police Captain Jeff Benzien has been demonstrating to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how he used to physically throttle political suspects it might seem incongruous to be agonising over the shortcomings of the press under apartheid — the “crimes” being, on the face of it, somewhat disparate. But in fact the […]

FRIDAY, 10.30AM TRANSPORT Minister Mac Maharaj and his Public Enterprises counterpart Stella Sigcau on Thuesday announced a shortlist of three for the position of adviser on the restructuring of parastatal Airports Company. The shortlisted candidates are: SBC Warburg in partnership with accounting and consulting firm Gobodo; Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank with Morgan Stanley and […]

FRIDAY, 12.30PM FORMER British MP Emma Nicholson, who has been sheltering Katiza Cebekhulu, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s kidnapping co-accused who was abducted and carried to Zambia to prevent him testifying against Madikizela-Mandela, said this week in London that she is to travel to SA in September and offered an interview to the truth commission. Nicholson, who has […]