The sole tourist venture permitted in Namibia’s normally arid Skeleton Coast has just opened for business Angus Begg ‘Remember to paddle when the waters reach us,” said Hunter Davies, noted English columnist and author of 40 books. He was seated in his bed in the dining room of a rather upmarket tented camp on Namibia’s […]
ZIMBABWE’s foreign payment arrears have climbed to at least $350-million dollars, raising the prospect of a default on its external debt and further fuel shortages, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. It said the deficit relates to payments for goods already dispatched to Zimbabwe and for orders not yet sent. Citing bankers it added that […]
Ivor Powell The Office of the State Attorney has stopped providing legal assistance to victims of apartheid atrocities appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) amnesty hearings and is instead funding only the torturers and policemen applying for amnesty. The decision hits victims currently employed by the state – mainly former Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) […]
Robert Mugabe may soon feel he has sufficiently muddled the issues and struck enough terror into voters and his opponents to win the forthcoming elections in Zimbabwe quite comfortably. If so, this may lead him to less violent and irrational political behaviour than he has shown since he lost the referendum on a new Constitution […]
Hypertext has had a huge effect on creative writing, pushing it to places it has been trying to go for decades Karlin Lillington When Apple decided to supply a copy of a little program called Hypercard on all Macintosh computers back in the 1980s, it prepared the way for what would become the Web’s most […]
ALAN FINLAY & Reuters, Johannesburg | Friday 4.00pm. THE rand was rocked to a fresh record low of R7,01 against the dollar on Friday, in the wake of a strengthening dollar and growing fears of the potential impact on South Africa of political unrest in Zimbabwe. However by late afternoon it had recovered marginally and […]
John Hooper in Berlin The former head of East Germany’s Olympic programme went on trial this week in what will be an unprecedented public examination of the project to produce super women athletes by feeding them steroids without their knowledge. Opening the trial of Manfred Ewald, once head of the Gymnastics and Sports Federation, the […]
New additions to the local insurance industry are a women-only policy and maintenance protection Heather Hogan Women (and men) wary of time-consuming, expensive and sometimes futile battles to get financial support after a divorce can now take out an insurance policy to protect them against the maintenance blues. However, people in customary marriages are excluded […]
world Mercedes Sayagues President Robert Gabriel Mugabe this week articulated his vision of Zimbabwe in the new millennium: one redolent with the stale air of Albania under the paranoid Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who led his country into extreme isolation and penury during the Cold War – a country cut off from the rest of […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, New York | Friday 8.50am. THE United Nations was in touch with major military powers on Thursday to bring its peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone rapidly to full strength after rebels there took more UN staffers hostage. “We are in discussions with the British and the Americans and I also raised this issue […]
Ben Cousins SECOND LOOK Zimbabwean-style land invasions are likely in South Africa in the future unless politicians begin to deal decisively with the highly emotive issue of unequal and racially skewed land distribution. This is a real prospect, despite the great differences between the political economies of the two countries. As in Zimbabwe, local invasions […]
Andrew Muchineripi SOCCER It never ceases to amaze me how much hot air is exhaled by Premier Soccer League coaches on the issue of fixture congestion without their offering even one constructive suggestion as to how the problem can be solved. Paul Dolezar says Sundowns face a 13- month season and the reaction of this […]
Richard Tomlinson CROSSFIRE South Africa’s cities are notorious for the exclusion of a significant proportion of the population from economic opportunities and social services. This exclusion has, in part, to do with the apartheid form of our cities: low- density, high-income, well-serviced, formerly white suburbs close to work opportunities; and large, impoverished, sprawling, poorly serviced […]
Cameron Duodu LETTER FROM THE NORTH In 1992 I was in Abuja, Nigeria, to cover former president FW de Klerk’s first official visit to Nigeria. As I sat down to face De Klerk and his officials at the news conference, I wondered whether they fully realised the historic importance of the visit. Nigeria had played […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 10.00am. NEGOTIATORS in close contact with Muslim rebels holding 21 people hostage in the Philippines, including two South Africans, said on Friday that all the hostages are still alive. They have apparently been moved to a single location after being split into smaller groups earlier this week. Negotiators said medical […]
Steven Friedman WORM’S EYE VIEW We can learn from events across our borders: but do we? An aspect of Zimbabwe’s trauma which has received less notice than it should is what it tells us about our own hang-ups. If citizens’ responses in radio phone- ins or letters to the press are a guide, that of […]
David Beresford ANOTHER COUNTRY Do rock climbers have the equivalent of a mile-high club? Do they delight, whether to themselves, or to friends, in the altitude, or the particularly diffficult circumstances in which they have “done it” – clinging to the bottom of an overhang, perhaps, or stretched halfway up a rock “chimney”? The question […]
Donna Block President Robert Mugabe’s government is now targeting top Zimbabwean businesspeople who are independent of the ruling Zanu-PF party as land invasions and violence against farmers and opposition supporters continue. The head of Zimbabwe’s third-largest company, Strive Masiyiwa, is now pondering his future surrounded by bodyguards in London after being warned by sympathetic security […]
Jubie Matlou The government has adopted a two-pronged policy towards land reform, namely land restitution and land redistribution. This policy is designed to reverse land ownership patterns that took shape following the Land Act of 1913, which saw 87% of the most arable land given to a ruling minority, and the remaining 13% to the […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Bulawayo | Friday 1.30pm. PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe greeted each other with bear hugs in Bulawayo on Friday ahead of the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair. The two leaders walked hand-in-hand along a red carpet and waved to a crowd of about 200 of Mugabe’s supporters before being whisked off […]
Thebe Mabanga IN YOUR EAR The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) is an interesting figure in South African broadcasting. It was established in 1993 to regulate the broadcasting industry and has made considerable, but sometimes jittery, strides in fulfilling its duties. One of its successes is the deregulation of the airwaves, with radio now reaching an […]
NET WATCH British director Mike Figgis’s latest film, Time Code, claims to be the first digital film shot in real time. The website at www.time code2000.com gives a demonstration of what downloading short movies is all about. The world’s biggest game of Tetris has been played by a group of Brown University students. They used […]
Marianne Merten A debt-collecting company, International Debt Control (IDC), chaired by former minister of finance Barend Du Plessis, has been expelled from the industry control body after being found guilty of unconscionable behaviour, acting dishonestly and failing to account for collected money. It is the second time IDC has been censured by the Association of […]
DURBAN Roodepoort Deep announced on Wednesday that executive chairman Roger Kebble is standing down and would become a non-executive director of the company. It said that Mark Wellesley-Wood will take over the reins as non-executive chairman and Mike Prinsloo will remain as chief executive officer. Wellesley-Wood, a mining engineer with 20 years experience in investment […]
Howard Barrell President Thabo Mbeki said this week that the crisis in Zimbabwe was the result of a failure to redistribute land in the country – rather than a violent manipulation of a grievance for electoral purposes by Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. In an address to the nation on Thursday night, Mbeki also rejected calls […]
South African teams might not make the Super 12 semi-finals, but their improved play is a boost for the Boks Andy Capostagno If only the wake-up call had come sooner. For most of the first six weeks of the Super 12, South African teams induced a sense of unremitting gloom with one- dimensional game plans […]
Mary Dover Picture the scene: you’ve just arrived at your four-star holiday hotel to find the paint peeling off the walls, the room smelling dank and pubic hairs in the bath. Not quite what the brochure promised but what recourse do you have now that the star system is redundant? Most of us have grown […]
Khadija Magardie A DAUGHTER OF ISIS by Nawal El Saadawi (David Philip/Zed) Islamic feminism is a virtual candy jar of typologies, incorporating pragmatists, radicals, secular feminists and even “neo- Islamists”. With the backdrop of Islamic laws and traditions, the different camps have one common concern – the empowerment of women within a rethought Islam. What […]
KENYAN Rotterdam marathon champion Kennedy Cheruiyot and Boston marathon women’s winner Catherine Ndereba have been left out of the country’s Sydney Olympics marathon team announced by the Kenya Amateur Athletic Association (KAAA) in Nairobi on Wednesday night. Cheruiyot and Ndereba were expected to earn automatic places in the squad by virtue of winning at Rotterdam […]
DEON POTGIETER, Johannesburg | Thursday 10.45am. SO confident is Baby Jake Matlala of winning a historic fourth world title when he challenges Peter Culshaw for the WBU Flyweight world title on May 24, that he is looking beyond this bout to his eagerly awaited rematch with Hawk Makepula in August. “I won our last fight,” […]
HEAVY rain has fallen for two days in the Gode region of eastern Ethiopia, which has been badly affected by drought, aid workers said on Thursday. “For two days without a break it has rained heavily in Gode,” according to an aid worker based in the Somali region, in the southeast. The new rains have […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday 6.00pm. PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki on Thursday expressed confidence that South African hostages, Callie and Monique Strydom, who are been held by Muslim rebels in the Philippines, will be rescued. In a special address to the nation, where he focused on the crisis in Zimbabwe, Mbeki expressed the government’s sympathy to […]