Staff Reporter

SOMALI gunmen last week captured 33 foreign fishermen said to have been fishing illegally in Somali waters and vowed to punish them under Somali law, according to local elders on Wednesday. The fishermen, who were captured off the the Somali Ayl coast in the region of Garowe, along with their 1000-ton fishing trawler, include two […]

Paul Kirk It would have been the ultimate New Year’s party – toasting in the millennium on board a ship once billed as the largest moving object in the world. But plans to rebuild the Titanic seem to have sunk while still in shallow water. Nearly two years ago, in January 1998, CEO of the […]

Isabel Hilton Jiang Zemin, president of the People’s Republic of China, can look back on 1999 with some satisfaction: it was the year in which he began to make his bid for immortality, his place in the pantheon of Chinese leaders, alongside Mao and Deng. So far, he could say to himself, so good. Some […]

COMMISIONER of prisons Khulekani Sitole, under investigation by the attorney general for corruption and mismanagement, has announced the suspension of his alleged accuser, KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner Thandiwe Kgosidintsi. Sitole said Kgosidintsi was under investigation herself, and was engaging in a personal vendetta. Meanwhile the Correctional Services Management Board, which met yesterday to discuss the allegations […]

intelligence and depth Gavin Evans It’s in the nature of those who attract epthets like “great”, “the greatest”, and now, of course, “the greatest of the millennium”, that a large proportion of the population should at least have vivid recall of how, why, and where this exalted human being came to their vicarious attention. I […]

South African film production began with the Anglo-Boer War – and remained in the trenches, writes AndrewWorsdale Cut to SouthEAfrica at the beginning of the century. The country is at the forefront of film-making internationally. No one in the industry is bitching about viability. It’s really Hollyveld, and it’s amazing. Given the dreary state of […]

CONTROVERSIAL former Truth Commision investigator Dumisa Ntsebeza is one of seventeen black acting judges appointed on Tuesday by Justice Minister Dullah Omar, who said he aimed to widen the pool of potential candidates for full-time positions to “ensure that it will be possible to promote representivity at a much faster rate”. Omar’s most senior appointment […]

Unless policymakers put their money where their mouths are, the position of women in the new century looks set to be as bleak as the previous one, writes Khadija Magardie Decades have passed and generations have grown up since the feminist movement first burst on to the world arena, promising women change and revolution in […]

report card Making the Grade What the scores mean A – Take a bow. You’re doing an excellent job B – Good, but room for improvement C – You’re OK, but that’s all we can say for you D – Get your act together. You’re verging on useless E – Do yourself and the country […]

Two thousand years of Christianity is too much, yet somehow not quite enough, argues Shaun de Waal The year 2000 looms. What are we celebrating, or about to celebrate? Two millennia of Christianity? Or a triumph of marketing in which we’ve forgotten the product but been dazzled by the catchphrase? Not that it really is […]

HUNDREDS of former Namibian guerrilla fighters have threatened to remain camped at Ondangwa Airport in the north of the country. They say they will stay despite a call from the Cabinet Technical Committee on Ex-Combatants to return to their homes and await news on jobs they have been promised. At least 580 ex-combatants are currently […]

Marthali Brand and Aaron Nicodemus Graham Armitage (63), radio, television and theatre personality best known for his roles in television productions such as The Diggers, Westgate and Shaka Zulu. Luis Argana (66), vice-president of Paraguay, killed by gunmen believed to have been sent by President Raul Cubas. Immediately after the killing, MPs voted to begin […]

1 Jomo Sono 2 Richard Branson 3 Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin 4 The Shah of Iran and the King of Albania 5 South 6 Enigma 7 De Voortrekkers, in 1916 8 Lech Walesa 9 Macao 10 Chris Patten 11 The Watergate 12 Luciano Pavorotti, Jos Carreras and Placido Domingo 13 Emily Hobhouse 14 General Fulgencio Batista […]

The idea of a poetry festival in Timbuktu has been wandering since 1992 in the mind of Breyten Breytenbach, poet, painter and member of the board of trustees of the Gore Institute. This has been shared with other poets and kept alive throughout several years. It finally took place before the start of the new […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, East London | Thursday 5.00pm. THE touring England cricket team are studying videotapes of Lance Klusener in a bid to devise a method of coping with the South African’s batting prowess. Duncan Fletcher, the England coach, said before the start of the third test in Durban on Sunday that the tourists have caught […]

Andrew Muchineripi looks at how 1999 treated local soccer It was a year that began with newly appointed Premier Soccer League (PSL) CEO Joe Ndhlela talking of a domestic set-up that would rival the best in Europe. It was a year that ended with Ndhlela suspended for bringing the game into disrepute after charges of […]

Paul Kirk, Nalisha Kalideen, Fiona Macleod, Marianne Merten and Connie Selebogo spoke to the parents of five children born this year ‘I want her to have all the choices she wants,” says 24-year-old Waleed Ajouhaar, a young father from gang- ridden Manenberg on the Cape Flats. His daughter, Aiesha, was born on November 19 and […]

William Safire Bliss on bem cumendum fiusende geara, Eallum! That’s “Happy New Millennium, everybody!” in the language that the residents of England were speaking in AD 1000. For this back-translation, which I have jazzed up only a little, I am indebted to Antonette diPaolo Healey of the Dictionary of Old English Project at the University […]

SPORADIC heavy gunfire was heard before dawn on Wednesday on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Sierra Leonean Information Minister Julius Spencer said the strikes were a “pre-emptive” measure by troops of the Nigerian-led Ecomog intervention force. “Everything is under control and there is no danger to the capital,” Spencer said in a local radio […]

world Mail & Guardian reporters Apartheid: The big A, institutionalised after 1948 under the National Party government, ensured the separation of South Africans. Under this idiotic system whites, blacks, Asians and coloured people were sorted in an extraordinary array of slots. Rights and privileges were assigned on a sliding scale, with whites on top, blacks […]

‘He, which hath no stomach to this fight / Let him depart, his passport shall be made / And crowns for convoy put into his purse: / We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us” -Henry V’s Crispian Day speech at Agincourt, by William Shakespeare There […]

Free international and local currencies may soon ride roughshod over conventional cash, suggest David Le Page and Donna Block Anyone who doesn’t cash in all his or her South African Airways (SAA)Voyager air miles by January 15 stands to lose them. Just kidding! But the sensation of panic this possibility offers gives some key insights […]

POLICE have reported an increase in drownings in rivers and dams in Gauteng since the beginning of the festive season, and say the figures seem likely to double last year’s. Last year, 15 people drowned between December 1 and January 3. Some of the drownings are attributed to drunkenness, while others would have been prevented […]

Aaron Nicodemus Nostradamus, a French physician whose real name was Michel de Nostredame, was buried in a Parisian church in 1566. He wrote over 1 000 poetic prophecies for the future, and many believe half of them have come true. He allegedly predicted with nearly uncanny foresight the French Revolution, the rise and fall of […]

Over the past 100 years sport has changed from a mere pastime to a multibillion-rand industry, writes Julia Beffon Before 1900 the word “sport” hardly existed in the context we now know it: amateurs played games, or excelled in one or other semi-military discipline, but few made physical exercise a career. Today sport is a […]

Marianne Merten The year started with a blast in Cape Town. On New Year’s Day 1999 a pipe bomb ripped apart a car in the V&A Waterfront parking, injuring two people, but resulting in no arrests. The year is ending with a bang – and confusion. Police and politicians sprang into action in November after […]

“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 […]