Staff Reporter

David Davies Golf Tiger Woods, for whom record breaking seems to be the normal situation, has equalled one of the more unlikely marks in golf, and is now in pursuit of one of the most preposterous. The world number one, whose win at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am this week took his successive United States […]

Michael Finch Hockey Claire Digby, the president of South Africa hockey, had a tough job this week. While delighted with the decision by the National Olympic Committee of South Africa (Nocsa) to include the women’s hockey side in the Olympic team, Digby also had to inform the men’s team that they would not be going […]

Hawkers who recently moved to the Rockey Street Market complain that the rental is too high, writes Jubie Matlou It’s a rare sight in South Africa to spot a white hawker selling his wares side by side with a black woman grilling mielies on a brazier. Andy McKay is one of the few white hawkers […]

Luvuyo Kakaza Review Today, unlike the 1980s, township theatre has gone beyond slogans, to the realm of everyday life. Pressing issues, like crime for example, still surface in work that remains topical, making allowance for small works of serious inclination. Sweet Chocolate, directed by Mufunanji Magalasi and written by Mike Manana, is a triumph. It […]

John Naughton Here is a story to make megacorp executives choke on their muesli: eToys.com, a huge online retailer of toys based in California, has been humiliated by a civil disobedience campaign orchestrated by a community of Internet activists. Late last year, eToys made the mistake of suing a group of Swiss multimedia artists and […]

John Cassy Sex has been overtaken by music as the most popular search request on the Internet. MP3, the technology that allows music to be downloaded direct from the Net, has knocked sex off the number one spot as the word or phrase most commonly entered into search engines. The rankings are from Searchterms.com, which […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni South Africa’s oldest leper colony is to be turned into a top tourism attraction in Gauteng, with lavish five star hotels, nature parks, and an up-market shopping mall. Last year the Gauteng Department of Health said the 125-year-old hospital, West Fort, was outdated and should be sold off to the private […]

Michael Finch Athletics Just when you thought that Athletics South Africa (ASA) was finally repairing the rift between administrators and athletes, it ruins all the good work. This week many of the country’s top stars had debit orders returned on car and house payments while battling to put food on the table, after ASA failed […]

Steven Poole MUSIC AND SILENCE by Rose Tremain (Chatto &Windus) Music and silence, as Rose Tremain knows, are not necessarily opposites. They inhabit each other. Silence is given meaning by the music built around it. And much of the meaning of music resides in the unique character of silence that it engenders at its end. […]

Channel vision Last Sunday’s Newsmaker interview with Mr Thabo Mbeki should be released on video as a teaching aid, for use in first-year state-of-the-art political sycophancy lectures. Marketed overseas it could become an academic gotta-have. If ever there was a demonstration of how callow and smarmy it is possible to become, this was it. Snuki […]

The biennial African Cup of Nations has brought some highlights – but also given England’s World Cup bid some ammunition to use against us, reports Andrew Muchineripi As Bafana Bafana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Tunisia prepare to battle for gold, silver and bronze this weekend, an African Cup of Nations that has produced good, bad and […]

Terry Bell unravels the murky past of the former Wits fine arts professor who siphoned aid funds into security police coffers, and is now in hiding in Spain Superspy Craig Williamson’s Spanish connection, Avio Barraclough (75), has gone to ground in Spain fearful of an official probe into his role in apartheid’s dirty war. The […]

Peter Dickson Surrounded by a depressing cocktail of shantyland and industria, its dark corridors almost endless and with stray goats grazing at its doorstep in the menacing Friday night shadow of gangsters, Port Elizabeth’s Dora Ngiza hospital is where babies are turned away to die. Every day at the hospital, battling to stretch limited finances […]

Paul Kirk The owner of The Ranch this week claimed that top policemen had frequented his establishment for free sex before last week’s raid on Johannesburg’s premier high- class brothel. The Ranch’s owner, Andrew Phillips, who has been released on R10E000 bail, said that in addition to using the facilities for free, senior officers struck […]

Howard Barrell and Barry Streek While the government has scorned talk of an economic “big bang” and sought to dampen expectations this week, statements by President Thabo Mbeki and his Cabinet colleagues reveal that they are initiating far-reaching changes designed to propel the economy to a higher growth path. Mbeki’s State of the Nation address […]

Ivor Powell and Heather Hogan It is all systems go for apocalypse now according to the Seventh Day Adventist Church as it surveys the devastation of upcountry floods and, before them, the coastal fires that ravaged South Africa. “There is great truth in these things. We are living in prophetic times,” church representative Eddie Harris […]

Chris McGreal The family of the executed Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, is at odds with the organisation he once led over plans to exhume and rebury him and eight other Ogoni activists hanged after a show trial in 1995. Saro-Wiwa’s eldest son, Ken Wiwa, has objected to the creation of a “burial committee” by the […]

THE United States said it has reached agreement with the West African nation Burkina Faso on an “open skies” pact that will allow unrestricted air service between the two countries. US Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater said the agreement was initialed in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on Wednesday and marked the first agreement between the United States […]

Jubie Matlou If the newly built Rockey Street Market in Yeoville is anything to go by, then the face of informal and street trading is set to undergo an unprecedented fundamental change. Informal and street trading in Johannesburg has a rich history that is interlinked with the country’s migratory labour system just before the turn […]

A travelling exhibition focuses on history’s silent witnesses, writes Alex Sudheim The crowd: that swollen, seething animal, comes to life when human beings swarm together in a single unity of desire. As an organism the crowd works its seduction by promising the surrender of individual will to the mass. Individuals, no longer responsible for their […]

Neil Manthorp Cricket Will out-of-form Hansie Cronje drop himself for tomorrow’s final of the Standard Bank triangular series? The answer, of course, is no. The captain might be struggling badly with the bat but he will as surely lead his team out at the Wanderers on Saturday as the sun will come up. Mind you, […]

There was a good deal to commend in President Thabo Mbeki’s speech opening Parliament this month. But in one particular at least he fell woefully short of giving South Africans the reasoned leadership and guidance that the State of the Nation address is meant to embody. This is the issue of the HIV/Aids pandemic, identified […]

TOP German cyclist Jan Ullrich heads a strong field for South Africa’s premier cycling event, the Vodacom Rapport Tour, which starts in Cape Town on Friday and ends on February 19. The 26-year-old Ullrich, 1999 Tour of Spain and 1997 Tour de France winner, leads the Deutsche Telekom team, one of 15 six-member teams competing […]

Ebrahim Harvey CROSSFIRE Unlike the earlier caution and equivocation of the ruling party, President Thabo Mbeki has recently openly called for the growth of a black capitalist class in order to provide greater stability and economic growth. But what are the real prospects for this development ? Black capitalism has arrived too late on the […]

Q & A Manaka Ranaka is the latest addition to the cast of Isidingo (SABC3, Monday to Thursday at 18.30pm). The blond, dreadlocked 20-year-old plays Nandipha, a streetwise maid for Derek Nyathi. In the few months since arriving at Horizon Deep, she has crossed paths with the town’s crook, George Zamdela, and wreaked havoc with […]

The rise of regional forces has Nigeria thinking the unthinkable. Chris McGreal reports from Lagos The end of military rule nine months ago has unleashed a store of bitter resentments in Nigeria that have fuelled ethnic massacres, the rise of militant regional organisations and a rush to introduce sharia law in the Islamic north over […]

Brenda Atkinson MIXED MEDIA At a conference on new media in New York last week, I realised that the advent of the Internet is probably the single most forceful contribution to consumer empowerment the past century has seen. The gurus of online research brought home the message: in a digitised media environment where apertures proliferate […]

South Africa may have as many as 20 000 Internet addicts, writes Howard Barrell Any South African company whose employees are linked to the Internet probably has at least one middle or senior manager suffering from some form of Internet addiction. And that may well be an underestimate of the problem, according to a number […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Friday 8.00pm South Africa is poised to rescue Zimbabwe from its crippling fuel and looming electricity energy shortages, a Zimbabwean cabinet minister said on Friday. Nathan Shamuyarira said at the end of talks between President Thabo Mbeki and Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe in Harare on Friday that they discussed the country’s […]

THE case against “People’s Poet” Mzwakhe Mbuli was delayed in the Randburg Regional Court on Wednesday after a dispute about Mbuli’s leg shackles. Mbuli appeared in court on charges of murder and armed robbery for allegedly killing a security guard during a bank robbery in 1997. The case was postponed after the defence counsel asked […]

EMSIE FERREIRA, BRYAN PEARSON , Cape Town | Thursday 8.30pm PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki on Thursday touched on his week-old remark that racism is still alive in post-apartheid South Africa in a much softer tone, assuring whites that he knows many of them have seen the light. In his opening speech to parliament last Friday, Mbeki […]

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki will go to Zimbabwe on Friday to see President Robert Mugabe about issues including the conflicts in Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo. The visit to Harare is part of South Africa’s efforts to improve its relations with its neighbours, Mbeki’s spokesman Parks Mankahlana said.