Capostagno golf Whether or not you enjoyed the 1999 Open Championship at Car-noustie rather depends on your view of professional golfers. If you share their view that the public wants to see birdies and eagles then you probably thought it was all a shocking waste of time. If on the other hand, you believe we […]
Peter Dickson Seven days of celebration is one hell of a birthday party – but veteran African National Congress activist and intellectual Govan Mbeki is no ordinary 90-year -old. Affectionately known to his comrades as Oom Gov, it’s been a hard road from rural Transkei to the Summerstand home along the Port Elizabeth beachfront where […]
“Brutus,” said Mark Anthony in that famously duplicitous speech, “is an honourable man.” And so we come to praise President Thabo Mbeki for the contributions he has made to the battle against HIV/Aids this week. Most immediately he has, by his controversial stance, ensured a degree of worldwide publicity for the cause such as the […]
Belinda Beresford In the United States mother-to-child transmission of HIV has dropped by about 75%, according to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). By far the largest number of infections of children are now in sub- Saharan Africa. Giving a short course of anti- retroviral drugs, such as AZT, has been shown to reduce […]
Andrew Muchineripi soccer The annual pre-season Iwisa Charity Spectacular competition was a noble idea with football giving desperately needed funds to some of the many less fortunate members of our society. There was also a novel method of choosing the four contestants with phone calls and letters from the public dictating who appeared before the […]
Cell C The high court case by unsuccessful bidders for the third cellular licence could be aided by a series of apparent blunders by the president’s office Ivor Powell Senior government figures this week scrambled to avoid further embarrassment over the Cell C debacle as they prepared for a court application by a rival bidder […]
Fiona Macleod A pack of 20 wild dogs, one of South Africa’s most endangered species, has been sold to a zoo in China where wild animals are kept in tiny cages and are forced to perform circus acts. Estimates of how many wild dogs there are left in South Africa range between 400 and 500. […]
The first award remembering a black South African journalist should have been named after ‘Mr Drum’ Arthur Maimane A panel of judges is probably already considering who should be the second journalist to be awarded the Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Black Journalism. The best of luck to whoever deserves to get it; but no […]
households Khadija Magardie Xolani Zungu (9) smiles shyly and unhesitatingly says, when asked what he wants to do when he grows up, that he wants to be a doctor. Like many boys his age, Xolani likes sweets, and playing with toy cars, and whispering behind the teacher’s back at school. But unlike his friends, he […]
Tangeni Amupadhi The dismissal of the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation’s (NBC) news boss for a report calling a Zimbabwean opposition leader “charismatic” has fuelled fears that the Namibian government is seeking to clamp down on press freedom. Nora Appolus was fired as controller of news and current affairs last week and demoted to manager for training. […]
Belinda Beresford The avalanche of Aids deaths flattening economies and smashing people’s lives is also rumbling at the heels of the pharmaceutical companies. Access to life-saving drugs, particularly anti- retrovirals, has been the cry of the Aids 2000 conference. For many that meant lowering the costs of drugs so that not just those in the […]
More than 50% of the world’s population live in cities and a phenomenally higher percentage is projected by 2020 David Macfarlane and Glenda Daniels Globalisation has led to a crisis of poverty and social disintegration in cities around the world. Traditional cities as coherent spaces of communal interaction are being overtaken by metropolitan sprawls. Reconstructing […]
The Olympic Games are just two months away and Sydney is gearing up for the big event Grant Shimmin in Sydney I was finding it a little difficult to believe. I mean, here I was in the city where it would soon all be happening and there seemed to be nothing to tell me about […]
Grant Shimmin You’ve got to feel sorry for the Aussies. (Well, you might if they weren’t the people who kept thumping us at every sport under the sun.) Here they are, organising the Olympics in a host city that has every natural advantage going, and things just keep going wrong. You don’t have to look […]
Matthew Krouse ‘Will those who want to see the Nguni spirit possession please proceed to level two …” the instruction rang out above the din of revellers who had come to launch the Urban Futures conference exhibitions programme. The halls of Newtown’s MuseuMAfrika, on July 10, had not seen anything quite like it before. Dried […]
Heather Hogan Also known as “Mandela’s children”, the Birth to Ten (BTT) project, a collaboration between several universities and organisations, has studied thousands of children for the past 10 years to gauge the effects of urbanisation and political transformation on their growth and well-being. In 1989 the project began studying 3 275 children from the […]
Paul Kirk KwaZulu-Natal has been hit by a wave of farm invasions in which thousands of squatters have stormed farms, stripping millions from the value of the province’s agricultural output. The invasions have destroyed at least 4E000 agricultural jobs in the Mangete area near Stanger on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast, where most of the 63 […]
The father of Venus and Serena has coached them into the history books. But his greatest achievement may have been to teach them there is more to life than tennis Richard Williams (no relation) and Duncan Campbell What he likes best is to get people off balance. One day he will be talking about buying […]
With Aids rampant and no cash for Western drugs, Africa is condemned to hopelessness and resentment Maggie O’Kane Malita Maxwell has Aids. But so does just about everybody else in the women’s ward of Chiradzulu hospital, with its broken air conditioner, smell of old, sweet urine and greasy mattresses covered in bright green plastic. In […]
Charlene Smith on being misquoted by the president who last week accused her of ‘racist rage’ How do you measure a president’s success or otherwise? By examining those he chooses to blame for his failures. President Thabo Mbeki and the Democratic Party’s Tony Leon have sent long letters to each other about HIV and rape […]
Thebe Mabanga in your ear South Africa badly needs a national music chart. One needs to be able to log on to the Internet or pick up a paper and be able see what song is flavour of the moment for the majority of entertainment consumers. Radio, by definition, has a crucial role to play […]
Laura Tisdall (13) and Polly Tisdall (11) in Didcot, Oxfordshire The moment the Hogwarts Express steam train finally puffed into Didcot Railway Centre last Saturday with JK Rowling on board was just totally magic. We’d been waiting for ages and ages with hundreds of other people, clutching our copies of the new Harry Potter book. […]
king David le Page and Mungo Soggot Some of the more controversial dealings of De Beers, the Oppenheimers and the United States government have been cast in a new light by a South African government request that the diamond conglomerate explain its ties with Maurice Tempelsman. Tempelsman, most renowned as a former consort to Jacqueline […]
Johannesburg | Friday 11.00am. VOLVO is to use South Africa as a base for exporting catalytic converters and alloy wheels to its global assembly plants. The plan, just announced, is one of the first of several countertrade projects to get the go ahead linked to the defence agreement between South Africa, BAE Systems and Swedish […]
David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY The brigade of determined faces that is the Tour de France has been hurtling across the television screen again and once more, after witnessing the agony of the proceedings, I come away puzzling: why do they do it ? Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, […]
The Aids 2000 conference in Durban has focused the world’s attention on how South Africa is dealing with the pandemic Belinda Beresford South Africa has been one of the sleeping behemoths of sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to Aids. The country has the greatest number of HIV infections in the world, accompanied by a fast […]
Ebrahim Harvey LEFT FIELD In the apartheid days the tiny black middle class, many of whom were drawn into the maelstrom of the anti-apartheid struggle because all black people were oppressed and denied equal opportunities, played a progressive role. Today, employed in the corporate and state sectors, or operating businesses, their numbers having swelled substantially, […]
A BRITISH model who flew to Cape Town earlier this week to promote the plight of thousands of penguins struck by an oil spill off the Cape coast is having something of an identity crisis. The saga began when the International Fund for Animal Welfare announced Alex Gain, winner of the Sun newspaper’s Babe of […]
ball Merryman Kunene Bafana Ngonzwane, a Standard 7 pupil at Malvern High, hails from Dobsonville in Soweto. He and his friends, Gift Sibeko and Vuyo Mrali, have long abandoned playing football in the township using balls made of plastic, bricks for poles and the occasional R5 bet that comes with it. All three have enrolled […]
Marianne Merten It is not unusual to see asylum seekers gathering outside the locked doors of Customs House on Cape Town’s foreshore as early as 7am. Hours later, the narrow linoleum-tiled corridor outside the fifth floor refugee office is a jumble of languages, frustration and patience worn thin among the dozens of applicants and home […]
President Thabo Mbeki has launched a campaign for an international economic system more advantageous to developing countries Howard Barrell President Thabo Mbeki is not given to timidity when it comes to “the vision thing”, as George Bush called it. Having declared his intention as vice president to rouse Africa into renaissance, as president he is […]
SAFAIR, the aviation leasing division of Imperial Holdings, announced three transactions worth more than R200-million, involving four passenger jets and a cargo aircraft. THE company has leased two McDonnell-Douglas MD81 jet airliners to Spirit Airlines, a US passenger carrier, for a period of eight years. In another deal, Safair purchased two additional ex-Austrian Airlines McDonnell-Douglas […]