CANADIAN mining giant Falconbridge has formed a “strategic alliance” with Impala Platinum Holdings (Implats) to undertake joint exploration for platinum group metals. Under the five-year agreement, Falconbridge will conduct grassroots exploration for new high quality platinum group metals projects worldwide. Implats will participate by contributing early stage project funding. After the earn-in phase for each […]
AnnMarie Wolpe second look In 1988 Harold Wolpe wrote a short, dense, theoretically engaging book, Race, Class and the Apartheid State. He argued that different and often diametrically opposed political views shared a common platform, which was to end apartheid. Yet these views neglected analyses that took into account the very conditions that upheld the […]
Guy Willoughby theatre Does German expressionism translate tangibly for a South African and contemporary audience? The question will occur to theatre-goers at Kurt Weill and Georg Keiser’s The Silver Lake (first performance February 18 1933), currently in its first local production at Spier. The expressionists sought to mirror psychological realities rather than physical appearances through […]
Sipho None handball It will be all systems go when the Gauteng Handball Association (GHA) clubs return to action later this month, and a German team’s tour will boost attempts to set up women’s leagues in South Africa. GHA, an affiliate of the South African Handball Federaton (SAHF), was formed in 1994 and has a […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Olifantshoek | Friday A POLICEMAN has been arrested after shooting eight supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) during a political protest in Olifantshoek in northwestern South Africa. The policeman opened fire on some 200 protestors with an automatic rifle after they hurled stones at him, a police colleague and a member of […]
Drinking while pregnant causes irreversible damage, condemning children to an inferior lifestyle Suzan Chala South Africa has the highest figures of foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in the world. According to the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Alcohol Relation Research, Professor Denis Viljoen: “One in 20 children in the Western Cape has FAS.” FAS […]
David Le Page ‘Nothing is being privatised,” says Johannesburg council water representative Jamieel Chand of the council’s management deal with a British-led consortium. The deal was signed two weeks ago and provides for a 12-person team from the winning consortium the Johannesburg Water Management Company (Jowam) to join the 2 500 workers employed by Johannesburg […]
Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION The latest half-hour to emanate from the television sitcom mass-production factory of Penguin Films is Madam and Eve, a conspicuously futile attempt to transpose the characters of a daily comic strip to the screen. The endeavour was doomed from the start and for all the obvious reasons. As I was blathering on […]
Bait. Jamie Foxx plays a very funny, motor-mouthed petty thief who becomes the titular bait for a major thief and computer genius. Monitoring our turbo-tongue is a cop (David Morse) who has had a mic-thingy implanted in Foxx’s jaw. Thus the latter’s every line can be heard by a team of state experts, and what […]
OFFICIALS in the Spanish-ruled Canary Islands have detained a Georgian-registered freighter carrying an undeclared cargo of 636 tonnes of Russian arms for Angola. The cargo, which the captain had tried to conceal, included several thousand cases of 7.62mm shells, mortar shells and night-vision devices. – AFP SUICIDE OVER TRAFFIC FINES A TAXI driver was so […]
Deon Potgieter boxing Jackie “Pressure Cooker” Gunguluza could be facing his Waterloo at the Graceland hotel in Secunda on Sunday. The veteran fighter will be attempting to win the national featherweight title a historic fourth time. At 35 this may be his last shot at the big time, and big time it will be. Not […]
Test cricket in Guyana, a country with a passion for politics, has had its volcanic moments John Young Guyana is the only one of the countries that the South African cricket team will be visiting in the next two months that is not a volcanic island. Politically, however, Guyana has experienced eruptions on a volcanic […]
Australia’s amateur had a transcending pre-eminence in the history of sport Frank Keating Some sporting pundit in the United States the other day tried to forecast the huge impact Tiger Woods looks sure to have on golf. All he could think of as a comparison for what Woods might be headed for was an historical […]
AMNESTY International has called on the United Nations to act quickly to protect people who have spoken out against human rights abuses in Togo and to appoint a special rapporteur to the country. The joint UN-OAU commission, which issued its report last week, was created in June 2000 after Amnesty International said the Togolese security […]
Khadija Magardie One of the most crucial ways of moni-toring the health of the nation is through mortality statistics. In a chapter on “Health status and determinants” in the South African Health Review, the authors argue that statistics need to be compiled more rapidly and the current disease notification system “needs attention”. The South African […]
Sophie Radice Body Language About 10 years ago I remember my mother telling me that she and another very good-looking friend in her early fifties had decided that they had reached the state of invisibility. I didn’t understand because at the time I was more concerned with different kinds of female invisibility, the kind where […]
Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane A hefty R975-million is in the kitty for skills development, yet about half South Africa’s employers are not claiming grants to implement training. This emerged at a two-day Skills for Productive Citizenship conference last week that launched a skills development strategy in South Africa, which has a 40% unemployment rate. […]
Former president Nelson Mandela spent an hour on Wednesday morning talking to Mail &Guardian editor Howard Barrell and associate editor Sipho Seepe.
Khadija Magardie Both legislators and the country’s anti-smoking lobby no doubt will welcome findings that tobacco use has dropped dramatically in South Africa. According to the latest South African Health Review, consumption of tobacco in South Africa “has fallen for eight consecutive years since 1991”. In the year 1998/1999 more than 30-billion cigarettes were released […]
A R5-million ‘donation’ from a United Kingdom armaments firm has not reached its intended target war veterans Paul Kirk Mystery surrounds the whereabouts of millions of rands donated by British Aerospace (BAe) to the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans’ Association (MKMVA) a few months before the company was named as the preferred bidder to supply jets […]
Barry Streek The Dutch government would continue supporting NGOs after it cut back on its development assistance to South Africa in 2004, the country’s Prime Minister, Wim Kok, said this week. It would continue current levels R750-million over five years but South Africa did not fit into Holland’s criteria for aid, which include levels set […]
Keith Gottschalk pays tribute to poet and novelist Tatamkhulu Afrika, who turned 80 late last year We’re here to commemorate Tatamkhulu Afrika the human being; to salute Tatamkhulu the citizen activist; and, last but not least, to celebrate Tamtamkulu the writer, by rejoicing on his 80th birthday and bagging his free autograph at his 12th […]
The Mail & Guardian, with Alec Hogg and the Moneyweb team, will launch a brand-new business section, Rands & Sense, to be published weekly in the M&G from March 9. Rands & Sense will bring M&G readers a business section anyone can understand, with insights from leading analysts. The section will be compiled and written […]
Paul Kirk The National Directorate of Public Prosecutions is close to completing a probe into allegedly corrupt practices involving the deputy mayor of Durban, councillor Logie Naidoo. This comes a week after the forensic investigative unit of the Durban municipality began a probe into Visvin Reddy the chair of the Durban unicity tender board and […]
Thuli Nhlapo The Doornkuil Farm south of Johannesburg that the African National Congress leased to the Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) Military Veterans’ Association is neglected. Except for few lean cows chewing long grass inside an electrified fence, there was little sign of life. A face-brick mansion on the property was empty. Peeping through the windows, we […]
David Beresford another country Afew years ago a water charge of more than R300 000 mysteriously appeared on my municipal services account. Living in a two-bedroom house with little more than a splash-pool by way of indulgence where water is concerned, I pointed out the obvious error to the municipal authority and forgot about it. […]
A land dispute with its roots in the days of King Cetshwayo is before the high court in KwaZulu-Natal Niki Moore ‘I don’t like being called coloured,” says Pat Dunn emphatically. “I am a human being first and a South African second.” Dunn is embroiled in a land claim dispute that takes up every waking […]
Marianne Merten The Human Rights Commission (HRC) wants the University of the Western Cape (UWC) to explain an across-the-board reduction of marks for final-year management students. The students’ marks for their labour relations course were reduced by the chair of the management department. HRC Western Cape coordinator Victor Southwell said provisional findings showed the reduction […]
As Thokoza residents who’d had their shacks demolished shivered in the rain, the new mayor of the area threw his second inauguration party Thuli Nhlapo It was raining last weekend when the Greater East Rand Metro mayor Bamvumile Vilakazi was inaugurated at a glamorous celebration at the Kopanong hotel in Benoni. In African culture, they […]
Fiona Macleod food It was during a bizarre encounter between some Gauteng hippie-vegan types and the red-meat-and-beer-boep toughs who belong to the Phalaborwa 4×4 Club that I recently came across an exciting range of vegetarian convenience foods. The Gauteng vegetarians/vegans, most of them members of South Africans Against Vivisection (Saav), were visiting up north for […]
Ntuthuko Maphumulo The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) managed to collect only 10% of the R2,3-billion owed to it. But manager Craig Stewart is not worried about the unpaid R2,1-billion. There are students in the scheme who have only recently graduated and begun finding employment, Stewart says. With the help of the South African […]
Fiona Macleod The Kruger National Park, South Africa’s premier tourist attraction, is experiencing a cash crunch running into millions of rands. An internal memorandum by park director David Mabunda last week says he expected the park to be R36,6-million in the red by the end of February. “The current overdraft (as at February 18) stands […]