Andrew Muchineripi : Soccer On a cold, wet evening in the industrial heartland of Germany the inevitable happened last weekend with the champions of Europe showing the champions of Africa just how wide the gap is between the continents on the football field. Bafana Bafana apologists have made much of their understrength team, conveniently forgetting […]

Janet Smith In a cyber world, girls are not necessarily made of sugar and spice and all things nice, nor do virtual crocodiles necessarily eat them smeared in caramel. But Codi (see cover picture), with her Fifth Element bob and her hot-stuff lycra playwear, is as spunky as good girls from reality are sweet. Born […]

Jonathan Romney New music Four months ago, Robert Wyatt became a grandfather at the age of 52, and it’s fair to say that the role suits him down to the ground. He has the right beard for the part, and he makes the kind of music you’d rather hope a grandfather would make – melancholic, […]

Uganda is a nation numbed by past atrocities. But, despite a booming economy, the hard times are not over yet. Matthew Engel reports On alternate evenings, everyone’s electricity is switched off for up to four hours at a time. North of the capital there is a savage war going on. There is another one to […]

Madeleine Wackernagel : Taking Stock Everybody’s talking about it – globalisation, that is. And everyone, apparently, is part of the new economic paradigm. There are exceptions, of course, but apart from a few retrograde isolationists, the world is one great big, happy market. We’ve been here before: globalisation is simply a new term for an […]

FRIDAY, 6:30PM: BENNETT SIBIYA, the man who ‘framed’ a Truth Commissioner, admitted yet another lie to the Goldstone Commission (see below): he said he only did gardening as a ‘cover’, and that his real occupation was a poacher. He said he had been caught poaching crayfish in January 1994 by policeman Des Segal. Instead of […]

Look out, it’s 1929 all over again, write Will Hutton, William Keegan and Ed Vulliamy The parallels are uncanny and unnerving. A United States where the president’s free- trading authority has been questioned, wave upon wave of devaluations being forced upon Asia and Latin America, and national banking systems in these continents imploding from bad […]

FRIDAY, 5.00PM: A GUNFIGHT between villagers and an army patrol left four dead and eight wounded in northern KwaZulu-Natal this morning. Villagers in a house in Nkandla in the Nkombe area suddenly opened fire on a patrol soldiers searching for firearms in an area with a long history of factional clashes. A seven-minute battle ensued, […]

his sleeve? The Most Reverend Njongonkulu Ndungane writes that Sipo Mzimela’s actions reflect a cavalier attitude to democratic government It is common cause that South Africa has some of the most overcrowded prisons in the world. It is also common cause that this country earned a name for itself, pre-1994, as having a prison system […]