Mail & Guardian reporter Friday, the Mail & Guardian’s arts and culture section, was chosen as Print Publication of the Year in Support of Arts and Culture at the 1999 Arts and Culture Trust Awards held in Cape Town on September 23. The M&G scooped three nominations, making it the undisputed leader in culture reporting. […]
Midi TV, owner of fledgling broadcaster e.tv, is besieged by problems, report Mungo Soggot, Donna Block and Ivor Powell Embattled television company Midi TV has hired one of South Africa’s most respected broadcast managers, Quentin Green, to help save fledgling broadcaster e.tv from the gallows. Midi TV’s chief executive officer, Marcel Golding, confirmed this week […]
Q & A Acclaimed jazz musician Don Laka recently launched his new album Supernova, his second recording as a solo artist. Playing solo allows him to be more experimental on acoustics. The name, Supernova, reflects Laka’s growing interest in cosmology. His first album, Destiny, was released internationally and led him to perform at the premier […]
HOSTS Wales defeated Argentina 23-18 in the opening match of the 1999 World Cup at the Milennium Stadium. Full match report to follow September Link to the day 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 […]
Mercedes Sayagues BODY LANGUAGE It is so much fun dating in this postmodern, post-feminist, post-Aids world. Go for a stroll in the heterosexual jungle, and you can put your thumb on the zeitgeist, on the changing roles of men and women. After a long, too long, monogamous relationship ended, I took a year-long break from […]
The murder of South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) advocate Anton Lubowski 10 years ago could have been linked to a South African military intelligence (MI) network in collusion with French businessmen and secret service agents, investigations by the Mail & Guardian have revealed. The network was out to obtain decisive political influence in the […]
Peter Dickson The Eastern Cape government has posted this week as the final deadline for new applications and applications for the reinstatement of welfare grants. The announcement was made despite an “indefinite” extension in May and the inability of district surgeons to cope with the number of applicants to be re- examined. The short notice […]
FORMER Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere is in a “critical” condition, a spokeswoman for the London hospital where he is being treated said Friday. “He is critical at the moment. He was in a stable condition yesterday and his condition has worsened,” she said. She said his family “want everyone’s prayers for him.” Nyerere, (77) was […]
‘renaissance’ Ebrahim Harvey The African National Congress-led government has to take a clear, strong and bold stand in support of the anti- debt Jubilee 2000 campaign. Much is at stake in the campaign for this country, the African continent and other poor countries. Onerous debt servicing lies at the heart of the intractable socio-economic problems […]
Telford Vice Cricket Four months after arriving at the World Cup as champions-in-waiting, the South African cricket team is floundering in a sea of insecurity. The familiar, inspiring strut is gone, faded to slope-shouldered tolerance of the fact that the supposedly low key tour to Kenya has lurched into a harsh spotlight. That is the […]
Ivor Powell speaks to National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka about his plans to bring down the kingpins of crime When National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka took office, he approached colleagues in the intelligence services requesting what was effectively a hit list. What the newly appointed crimebuster was looking for was the […]
SOUTHERN African leaders will meet with business and labour leaders from the region and abroad on Sunday in a bid to boost regional economic growth and cooperation. The leaders will meet under the auspices of third annual Southern African International Dialogue (SAID) at a luxury hotel in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. The four-day meeting will […]
Subcontracting in the gold-mining industry is eroding working conditions and miners’ safety, writes Barry Streek A new study has found that South African gold mines are increasingly relying on subcontracted labour, estimated to make up more than 10%of the labour force, which has rolled back union power and worker rights. Very little is known about […]
follow Andy Capostagno At the final of the 1991 Rugby World Cup there was a small group of people in green and gold shirts holding a banner which read, “The Springboks; the real world champions”. On that bright winter’s day at Twickenham, when Nick Farr-Jones held aloft the William Webb Ellis trophy, such bombast from […]
Arts Alive Festival manager Roshnie Moonsammy hits out at freeloaders who badger festival staff Remember – throughout the years of the cultural boycott, South Africans missed out on seeing their favourite artists. One such artist was Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Many loved him and respected his political commitment to eradicating racism and poverty in Nigeria, and […]
Chris Gordon The Democratic Republic of Congo faces a new form of colonisation – this time from its ally, Zimbabwe, which last year intervened in the war to save President Laurent Kabila from being ousted by rebel forces. Now it’s payback time for the broke government of President Robert Mugabe. If a deal for the […]
Andrew McUtchen Music Two years ago, the Mail & Guardian reported on the disturbing prevalence of violence at kwaito gigs, from performers as much as the audience. Last week, at the One City, Many Condoms Aids awareness concert at Cape Town’s Langa stadium, a threat to personal liberty of an entirely different kind awaited this […]
Shaun Harris TAKING STOCK With the end of the year hurtling down on us like a minibus on the N3, a lot of people are trying to form a view on where the local economy and investment markets are going. Those brave enough are even trying to see past the mother-of-all New Year’s Eve parties […]
Amy Lawrence Gliding over the deep red lino in thick claret socks which flap around his calves, Joe Cole looks like your average teenage apprentice milling around the training complex. His life is about to change for ever. He is about to embark upon a journey of infinite possibility. If fortune favours him, he could […]
Howard Barrell OVER A BARREL It is the government’s job to put our tax money where our mouths are. We expect it to allocate revenues to the priorities we have agreed. This makes the annual budget, which sets tax and spending targets, the cutting edge of policy. But who is to decide how the edge […]
Scotch Tagwireyi The Directorate of Serious Economic Offences has decided to prosecute its own cases as directors of public prosecutions have failed to bring many of their investigations to court, some of them dating back to 1993. Jan Swanepoel, director of investigations at the Directorate of Serious Economic Offences, says he believes the delay is […]
Researching Herman Charles Bosman’s prison memoir, Stephen Gray got into his death cell Shows how much I knew about South Africa’s most famous inland jail, Pretoria Central Prison. There its most celebrated inmate, Herman Charles Bosman, spent “a somewhat lengthy sojourn”, as he put it in Cold Stone Jug. But that was in the 1920s. […]
Fiachra Gibbons In the time-honoured tradition of the Booker, all the leaks about who would be shortlisted this year were wrong. Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Roddy Doyle – the heavyweight “favourites” for this year’s prize -didn’t make the shortlist. Instead, South Africa’s JMCoetzee is up for the prize for the second time. The chairman […]
year’s Booker Prize?And who has been left out? DISGRACE by JM Coetzee (Secker &Warburg) An embittered, disgraced Cape Town professor goes to live with his daughter on an Eastern Cape farm, where they are savagely attacked. The prose never spills a drop, and is almost bloodless in its pale perfection. – James Wood FASTING, FEASTING […]
David Gough in Kenya It was a hot summer’s day, and Joseph Ekuwam and two friends from his village were herding cattle in the arid plains of northern Kenya when they came across a shiny object half-buried in the ground. What they thought to be a harmless piece of metal turned out to be a […]
Christian Figenschou When the conversation turns to insurance companies, most people just roll their eyes. The general attitude seems to be that insurance is a necessary evil, for which you must pay excessively high premiums, but don’t ever expect to recover your full loss, especially if your car is older than five years. However, in […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby World Cup As opening games go, South Africa’s match against Scotland at Murrayfield on Sunday looms as a considerably easier task than the corresponding fixture against Australia in Cape Town in 1995. But that is where the simplicity ends. Kitch Christie’s team was expected to lose against a demonstrably more talented Wallaby […]
Peter Hammond RIGHT TO REPLY Your correspondent, Ivor Powell, accuses me of “gun-running” and “of supplying military hardware and training to Sudanese Liberation Army rebels” in the front page banner headline article, “SA pastor in row over gun-running to Sudan” (September 23 to 30). I wasn’t aware of any such row – it would appear […]
Barry Streek In a bold move towards transparency in the contentious area of arms sales, the government has published details of South Africa’s sale of arms to 83 countries over the past three years on a website. Although it does not disclose details of what weapons were sold, it give details of four categories. Category […]
Caught in a civil war, thousands of Mozambicans sought refuge in South Africa in the 1980s, writes Nicola Johnston After nearly two decades in South Africa, a group of 250 former Mozambican refugees have recently been assisted to return to their former villages in Mozambique. They became the first convoy of a group of 600 […]
skills Marianne Merten Cape Town is often described as the rape capital of the world and it is here that Albanian women – who deal with survivors of horrendous mass rapes – came to share and learn. Discussion of rape is still very much a taboo in Kosovo and Albania, says executive director of Albania’s […]
Barbara Ludman INDIANA GOTHIC by Pope Brock (Review) Anyone who hasn’t a skeleton in the family cupboard isn’t looking hard enough. Pope Brock didn’t have to look far – there had always been rumours of something funny about Great-Grandmother Maggie, something weird about the sudden death of Great-Grandfather Ham. Eventually, an elderly great-aunt steered Brock […]