Staff Reporter

Shaun de Waal movie OFTHEWEEK Jesus’ Son, in case you were wondering, has nothing to do with the offspring of the messiah, who in any case is considered by the mainstream Christian tradition to have led a sex-free life. Alternative traditions whisper of a passion for the ex-prostitute Mary Magdalene, and a French royal dynasty […]

Cameron Duodu Letter from the North By allowing “Eric the Eel” (Eric Moussambani, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea) to take part in the Olympics Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has done Africa a great favour. But I doubt whether that was their original intention. You don’t need to be a genius to realise that […]

members Glenda Daniels The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) resolved at its seventh national congress to take concrete steps to change the gender composition of the federation. The union movement committed itself to an aggressive drive to recruit women workers and to ensure greater women representation in its leadership structures. With most cases […]

Grant Shimmin olympics The season of clutching at straws is almost over and my number in the press medal pool looks unlikely to come up. I went for 10 gongs, including two golds (Penny Heyns and Llewellyn Herbert), so my chances are somewhere between slim and non-existent. That said, with just the last weekend of […]

Khadija Magardie Entering Dr Manuela Costa’s medical practice in a nondescript, semi-deserted building in Wynberg, near Alexandra, patients are greeted by a poster carrying a poem. It reads: “Bless the people who cross this threshold, Bless the souls who need to be here … But take away the anger; take away the hurt, Take away […]

fraud A plastics company has approached the Banking Adjudicator over a dispute it has with its bank after the payment of a fraudulent cheque David Le Page A Free State company is battling to recover R116 000 paid out from its account by Standard Bank to First National Bank (FNB), after the latter honoured a […]

David Macfarlane ‘This is a signal South African universities could have done without right now,” says a shocked senior academic in response to Tuesday’s unexpected announcement that University of the Witwatersrand vice-chancellor Professor Colin Bundy will leave the university less than halfway through his seven-year contract. Bundy leaves not only Wits but the country as […]

A collection of art works currently on sale offers a good opportunity to take another look at the African art debate Yvette Gresl With all the African art works flooding flea markets, roadside stalls and curio shops, regular mortals who’d like to collect such objects often wonder how one begins to distinguish between fakes and […]

Banks blame small volumes and fraud for rising charges – and expect customers to grin and bear the costs David Le Page The apparent neglect of the cheque management system by South African banks is a major reason why consumers pay higher and higher bank charges at a time when automation is reducing costs in […]

Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane The South African Universities Vice- Chancellors Association (Sauvca) this week rejected the heart of the Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) recent recommendations for restructuring tertiary education. The core of the recommendations are that all institutions be re-arranged to create what Sauvca refers to as “a three-tier system”, one that it […]

David Le Page Besides cheque fraud, the other major reason offered by South African banks for high bank charges is an overly small market, or as they put it, “inadequate volumes to justify the infrastructure involved”. The banking industry explains its quandary as follows. As more banks have appeared in the country, the major retail […]

The idea that software could ever be sophisticated enough to identify pornographic images is sheer fantasy, writes Avedon Carol Moralists and Net-nanny software hucksters have put a lot of effort into convincing the public that our kids are unsafe on the Internet and that we need to put strict controls on what people can see. […]

Gavin Evans Hezekiel Sepeng comes fourth: the rolling picture says it all. Disorganisation, bad timing, leaving it too late – the fate of South Africa’s sole black medal prospect on the track was set well before the losing line. And as with Sepeng so with South Africa’s entire Olympic bid. Eight years ago in Barcelona […]

Adam Evans I was having a quiet drink with an old friend the other day when he told me, very proudly, that he had just finished his first novel. This was completely out of character – he had never displayed any interest in writing before – and, with mounting amazement, I asked him what it […]

‘illegal’ Thuli Nhlapo Ignoring the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s (Cosatu) campaign to create and sustain jobs in the textile industry, the Independent Electoral Commission’s (IEC) promotional clothing is imported and believed to have entered the country illegally. Shereno Printers, which won a contract to print 100E000 T-shirts for IEC staffers to wear in […]

Rory Carroll and agencies The captain and three crew members of a Greek ferry that sank killing at least 65 people have been charged with multiple counts of murder. Investigators were focusing on reports that the Express Samina, carrying more than 500 passengers, was apparently on automatic pilot minutes before it hit a well-marked rocky […]

book of success Thebe Mabanga The secret of Kenya’s success in long- distance running is centred on comparative advantage. The East African road running powerhouse’s rise in middle- and long- distance competition has been carefully plotted over the past decade and a half. It has been brought about by a combination of ideal weather, intensive […]

Ordinary Chinese in South Africa look to charity, religion, business and culture to counter divisive politics. Osita Nwajah reports The men, women and children assemble in their numbers. The compact space outside a house in Mamatheda Street in Mofolo, Soweto, can’t contain all of them, so they spill into the narrow street. The people, clutching […]

In super-heavyweight weightlifting the walls have ears – and torsos and legs Neal Collins There are 10 men lined up on stage in front of me, ready for the men’s super-heavyweight weightlifting. From Russia, Latvia, Armenia, Korea, Ukraine (two), Germany, Poland and even Qatar and Iran. Like massive peas in a prodigious pod, this multinational […]

The dream was of a personal jet-pack and not just for the high flyer. However this blue skies technology never took off David Hambling This 21st century is not what it was cracked up to be. It is not that I actually wanted to live in a gleaming glass skyscraper attended by robot butlers, and […]

Pule waga Mabe The vice-chancellor of the University of the North, former Truth and Reconciliation Commission commissioner Biki Minyuku, has filed a review application in the Pretoria High Court against his suspension. Minyuku was suspended last December without knowing the charges against him, or a disciplinary hearing. Minyuku’s attorney, Solly Manamela, says the university disregarded […]

Timothy Trengove-Jones CROSSFIRE The clearest indication of the health of this democracy is to be found in discourse surrounding the HIV/Aids pandemic. President Thabo Mbeki has told Parliament, the country and the world that this government’s policies on HIV/Aids are “based on the thesis that HIV causes Aids”. He has also conceded that the government’s […]

Gavin Evans The task of increasing a country’s medal quotient starts at the top. International precedent suggests you can even pull it off without a thriving grassroots base or deep tradition of participation. Take Britain, for example. Four years ago in Atlanta it experienced a disaster of similar proportions to South Africa’s Sydney effort. But […]

friday Golf: German Masters, at 2pm on SuperSport1 (SS1/CSN) Rugby: Currie Cup, Super Eights, round two, Pumas vs Cheetahs at 7pm on SS1/CSN saturday Cricket: Second one-day international (ODI), Zimbabwe vs New Zealand, at 9.25am on SS2 Rugby: New Zealand NPC series, Auckland vs North Harbour at 6.35am, Waikato vs Canterbury at 7pm (delayed), Northland […]

Brenda Atkinson review OFTHEWEEK Since coming back to Johannesburg in 1996 after an absence of more than 20 years, Rodney Place’s work has been characterised by lacerating irony, his perspective that of the city’s prodigal son, returned from his adventures only to find that he can’t get to the fatted calf for the security gates […]

If found guilty in a departmental hearing, Piet Meyer could be dismissed for misconduct before he is tried next year on a string of criminal charges Paul Kirk Disgraced and suspended former head of police organised crime units in KwaZulu- Natal, Senior Superintendent Piet Meyer, is in trouble again – this time for allegedly hacking […]

David Le Page AFRICAN FRONTIERS To slow the melting of the polar ice-caps, build some ceilings in Soweto. This is one of the implications of a study on environmentally friendly low-cost housing recently commissioned by the national Department of Housing. But it’s not the most important – making home environments more comfortable is a far […]

Personal bests, not medals, were the order of the day for South Africa’s Olympic team Grant Shimmin It was the strangest of situations. Two South African 400m athletes had qualified for the finals of the men’s and women’s events at the Olympics, both for the first time, and each had run outside the gold medal […]

experiments Fiona Macleod South Africa is earmarked for experiments on animals that have already seen thousands of them dying agonising deaths. The experiments involve pumping human genes into days-old piglets and then transplanting their hearts into baboons and monkeys. Top-secret documents by scientists researching the process, called xenotransplantation, show that thousands of animals have died […]

Mercedes Sayagu’s Body Language I have discovered the new erogenous zone for the new millennium. I am embarrassed it took me so long. But I may be excused: I hit the party circuit only a few months ago, when my last lover dumped me. In more than one way, I was a casualty of the […]

As a teenager, Naomi Klein was a dedicated mall rat, fixated on designer labels. A decade later she is the author of a life- changing book on anti-corporatism. Katharine Viner meets the woman who is reinventing politics for a new generation >From the age of six, growing up in Canada, Naomi Klein was obsessed with […]

Tony Leon CROSSFIRE Retiring United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once memorably observed: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” So, too, with Crossfire (“Democracy requires wisdom too”, September 22 to 28). In order to concertina my words into his argument, Firoz Cachalia is guilty, at best, of elliptical reasoning […]