Staff Reporter

KAPITAN’S, a favourite restaurant of President Nelson Madela and Oliver Tambo when they were young attourneys was saved from being burnt down on Wednesday. The fire started after fireworks were let off on the in Johanesburg city centre eatery’s wooden balcony but the damage was minimal after firemen put it out. Kapitan’s has become something […]

ANGOLAN soldiers have captured an island occupied by Unita rebels along the border with Namibia. Namibia said Angolan soldiers found 50 mortar bombs, 200 landmines, two cannons and other military equipment on the small island, situated on the narrow Kavango River, about 200km east of Rundu. It was being used by Unita to “position its […]

PROSECUTORS meeting in Durban on Wednesday to discuss a 6% pay rise announced on Tuesday called for the resignation of Justice Minister Dullah Omar. Prosecutors say they have an average daily workload of 20 dockets and three court appearances, which does not allow them to perform their jobs adequately, SABC TV reported on Wednesday night. […]

A MAN who gunned down an elephant in the Kruger National Park and hacked out its 65kg tusks, was sentenced to 20 years in the Skukuza Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday. The sentence is the stiffest given in the history of the South African National Parks. The poacher, Shalate Khoza, is currently also serving a 10-year […]

PRESIDENT Nelson Mandela officially declared on Wednesday the tornado-stricken Eastern Cape districts of Umtata, Libode and Ngqeleni as disaster areas, the Welfare Department said on Thursday. Those affected by a tornado which killed 18 people and injured 162 on December 15 can apply for relief, the departmental said. Applications will be considered by the board […]

THE National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, representing 400 workers at Anglo American Platinum’s (Amplats) base metals refinery in Rustenburg on Wednesday declared a dispute with the company over wages. Numsa said it is ready for a battle with management after contract talks on Tuesday stalled over the wage issue. Numsa said it is […]

PHILLIP Ndou has moved up to the number-five spot in the WBA ratings after successfully defending his WBA Continental featherweight title for the first time. Ndou, nicknamed “Time Bomb”, stopped Laureano Ramirez of the Dominican Republic inside three rounds of their scheduled 12-rounder at Johannesburg’s Wembley Arena last Wednesday. Promoter Branco Milenkovic received a letter […]

ALL staff at Mpumalanga’s Tourism Authority (MTA) have lost their jobs and will have to re-apply for positions when the organisation is restructured early next year. A group of 17 staff members have already consulted with attorneys in an attempt to fight the move but declined to comment for fear of prejudicing their legal claims. […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 11.00am. PHIL Masinga, Bafana Bafana’s leading all-time goal-scorer, could be out for as long as six months with a knee injury. Masinga, who has netted the ball 16 times for South Africa, will miss next month’s African Cup of Nations in Ghana and Nigeria. Masinga sustained a ligament injury during […]

THE Inkatha Freedom Party has condemned the murder of six people early on Wednesday morning at remote KwaMachi on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. Six men, aged between 40 and 60, were shot and hacked to death and several others were wounded during the attack which is believed to be related to faction fighting in the […]

AN estimated 220000 tourists are expected to travel to the beaches of Mozambique through the Lebombo border post this Christmas. Border police spokesperson, Captain Hansie Wessels, said on Wednesday that 140000 people have already passed through the border post since December 1. “We’ve beaten the previous year’s record every year since 1994 and expect to […]

TELFORD VICE, Durban | Saturday 6.00pm. ENGLAND await injury verdicts while South Africa face a selection dilemma on the eve of the third Test at Kingsmead on Sunday. Another problem for both sides has been this week’s flash floods in Durban, which have killed at least 23 people and left thousands homeless. England have been […]

STEVEN MANN, Cape Town | Saturday 6.00pm SOUTH Africa’s elite crime fighting unit, the Scorpions, is to head investigations into Friday night’s bomb attack outside a Greenpoint restaurant on Friday night which left seven policemen injured, two of them seriously. Safety and Security Minister Steve Tshwete made this announcement after visiting the scene of the […]

“This man is the person who raped me, sir. It’s very difficult to forget his face.” – Journalist Charlene Smith, asked by rape accused Johannes Zinto’s lawyer how she can be sure Zinto was her alleged rapist “Although it is morally reprehensible to rape one’s own child, the man’s sexual deviancy was limited to his […]

Fiona Macleod The pendulum swings for 594 plant species, 14 animal species, 62 bird species and dozens of insect species in Southern Africa at the turn of the millennium. Already in the past couple of centuries, at least 59 Southern African species are known to have become extinct. The list includes 53 plants, two butterflies, […]

Shaun de Waal This year saw the centenary of the birth of the man considered by many to be the United States’s foremost composer. Duke Ellington was born in 1899 and died in 1974: his lifespan covered three quarters of this century, and more than 50 of those years were spent making wonderful music. James […]

Howard Barrell spoke to a Cape Town cosmologist who believes there will always be a limit to what science can do In terms of the age and extent of the universe, the passing of the millennium that many of us are marking with such fervour, fear or superstition is an irrelevance, according to George Ellis, […]

More than 99 years of scientific progress has been tracked by the Nobel Prize, writes David Le Page It is unlikely any scientist ever began research with an eye on the Stockholm academies administering the prizes founded by dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. But their stature and heritage has come to make them an incontrovertible map […]

Guy Willoughby Comedy, drama, car chases, derring-do … at this crazed end-of- decade/century/millennium/world party season, the Cape has it all, although mostly offstage. Other managements are desperate to compete with our town’s longest-running entertainment – the South African police’s extraordinary efforts to help, or hinder, the seasonal killjoy bombers. Here’s a shortlist of the goodies […]

shook the world “Search in your past for what is good and beautiful. Build your future from there.” – Paul Kruger, 1902 “The only white race that has steadily been going backwards to barbarism.” – Sir Garnet Wolseley comments on the Boers during the Anglo-Boer South African War “E=mc2” (Energy equals mass times the speed […]

Christian Figenschou They’re the stuff of dreams, nightmares, aspirations and obsessions, freedom and empowerment; of all the inventions of the past 100 years, the motor car best captures the essence of the 20th century. The first self-propelled wagons were described as long ago as the 17th century, and the 19th century saw steam-powered carriages, but […]

Shaun de Waal The books that most profoundly shaped the thought of this century were written before it began – Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Each in its way was at the epicentre of a movement that rippled out […]

The theatres may have been empty, but 1999 saw massive new audiences for television and music, writes Charl Blignaut Television One day near the beginning of 1999 a producer at Generations was called to reception at the SABC studio to “deal with a situation”. Waiting for him with a letter in her hand was an […]

In South Africa we should perhaps have called the Y2K bug something more indigenous – Tokoloshe 2000 would be appropriate, writes Gavin Foster Remember the tokoloshe? The little man with the tail who was blamed for everything that could possibly go wrong? When the goats strayed it must have been the tokoloshe that made their […]

barbarians Millennial fears of Y2K chaos and resulting social disorder are merely expressions of intense political anxieties, writes Bryan Rostron ‘Imagine,” said the minister’s adviser, pointing at the sprawling squatter settlement on the mountain opposite my home, “as clocks tick over to 2000, if government computers crash, power failures, communications, police and army disoriented.” He […]

Robert Kirby We approach the end of the century and it’s nowhere to be found. The long- awaited, enviously portentous but never threatening: the Great South African Novel is yet to be written. It’s not that there hasn’t been a wealth of human experience in this country. This century kicked off with a boisterous local […]

When fame is an open book, Christ, Shakespeare and Lenin lead the list of icons who have inspired the world’s authors, writes Martin Kettle in Washington If fame is having a book written about you, then as the subject of no fewer than 17 239 books, Jesus Christ remains the most famous figure in the […]

A hundred years ago Marlow, the steamboat captain in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, mused about the rape of the Congo, then in full fury under the Belgian King Leopold. The conquest of the Earth, which “mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is […]

Aaron Nicodemus PERSON OF THE YEAR … CHARLENE SMITH Charlene Smith’s home has become a national clearing house for information on rape and Aids. She receives five or six calls a day from rape survivors, asking for help and support. She gets calls from government officials, women’s groups, doctors, policemen, insurance companies, men married to […]

Robert Kirby remembers his childhood and the part three men society politely termed ‘mentally deficient’ played in it My first clear memories of the Durban where I was born and grew up were of the war years, the early Forties. A domestic world of absent fathers and uncles, mothers’ heads bent to static-filled wartime radio […]

Andy Capostagno It should have been the best of times, but far too often it was the worst of times. Australians will not remember the cricket and rugby world cups of 1999 in such negative terms, but the truth hurts. Here were two tournaments four years in the making, on comfortable growth curves from successful […]

In the mid-1800s, it was derided by Europe as an ‘experiment in gross vulgarity’. Today, it bestrides the world culturally, economically, technologically and militarily. Christopher Hitchens charts the unstoppable rise of the United States Who looks at an American book?” asked the Reverend Sydney Smith scornfully in the Edinburgh Review of the mid- Victorian epoch. […]