The Microsoft trial is back in full swing and just in case you’re feeling sorry for William Gates III, just stop by the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, . Philip Greenspun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology runs a little programme on his site which updates the Spectacled One’s fortune based on the daily price […]
Riaan Wolmarans There are few things as irritating as seeing a suburban housewife sing the praises of the newest super-duper washing powder (“My husband is a mechanic …”) or hearing about the latest waist-slimming, brain-numbing exercise belt-cum-vibrator (order now and get this stylish set of porcelain ducks for free). Thankfully the ad industry does manage […]
tennis Sandra Spavins takes a look at a range of recently released books for teenagers The Sanlam Prize for Young Literature and the Young Africa Award continue to encourage new South African writing for teenagers, and the books themselves tackle issues ranging from genetic engineering to sexuality, including stories set in the future or dealing […]
Shirley Kossick A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES: TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART by Lyndall Gordon (Chatto & Windus) After Leon Edel’s Pulitzer-winning five- volume biography of Henry James (1953-72) and numerous subsequent studies, it is difficult to believe that anything fresh is left to be said about James. Lyndall Gordon, however, proves this assumption […]
Troop movements on both sides of the Congo conflict belie the peace talks in Lusaka, writes Ivor Powell A massive showdown that could determine the course of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is looming in the diamond-rich region in the centre of the country. Regional talks in Lusaka this weekend aimed at […]
The G8 nations have pledged a $100-billion debt relief package. Gary Younge reports from Mozambique, one of the first countries in line for such relief. Julius Nyerere Avenue in Maputo starts on the shores of the Indian Ocean and runs in a more-or-less straight line towards apparent prosperity. The road stretches past the palatial Polana […]
AN electric locomotive pulling 18 goods trucks derailed on Thursday at Rosenegal near Middelburg in Mpumalanga, causing damage of more than R100 million. Police said that the train driver and his assistant were missing. The train was on the way to deliver titanium slabs to Highveld Steel at Witbank when the accident happened at about […]
Stephen Gray THE DARK STREAM: THE STORY OF EUGENE MARAIS by Leon Rousseau (Jonathan Ball) Eugne Marais, with his passion for the South African wild outdoors, put the Northern Transvaal’s Waterberg district on the map. His memory is still celebrated there. In the Nylstroom library, an alcove is fittingly devoted to his bust (sculpted by […]
THURSDAY, 12.15PM: BAFANA Bafana may be out of the World Cup finals, but they have reason enough to hold their heads high, writes ROB DAVIES. The fact that the South Africans qualified for the tournament is testimony to their spirit and their commitment to South African soccer. For a side that has only been playing […]
Opera Coenraad Visser The State Theatre’s production of Manon is a milestone in many respects. It is the first production of Massenet’s early masterpiece in South Africa, an all-South African cast does full justice to the rich score and a South African production team presents a unified artistic vision that draws on the best European […]
Friday night Mercedes Sayagues Zimbabwe has a Lost City, in the Great Zimbabwe ruins, and a Fun City, in Vic Falls. More than half a million tourists flock every year to Vic Falls to have fun, since that is what tourists are supposed to do. The town has caught the disease. Every day is a […]
gates skeletons John Grobler Namibia’s Central Intelligence Services (NCIS) this week took the unusual step of asking for public assistance to identify 57 skeletons discovered in the desert outside the southern harbour town of Lderitz. In a rare public appearance, Director General of the NCIS Peter Sheehama said the skeletons were discovered as long ago […]
Alarm bells are ringing after the Canadian and Spanish Grands Prix produced less wheel-to-wheel action than ever, writes Alan Henry So finally Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley, the two most powerful voices in Formula One, have conceded what most spectators have known for many a season. Overtaking is – wait for it – “probably a […]
Matthew Krouse The Encounters Swiss South African Documentary Film Festival is the first of its kind in South Africa. Given our proud history of documentary film-making it’s surprising that no others have preceded this major event that launched on June 20. An initiative of the film department of the Swiss cultural organisation Pro Helvetia and […]
New Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa’s choice of cabinet has left senior provincial African National Congress members disgruntled, reports Makhosini Nkosi Sevaral high profile African National Congress Gauteng leaders plan to meet this weekend in a bid to secure the intervention of the party’s national leadership to resolve problems that are threatening to destroy the party’s […]
Marianne Merten Candlelight vigils, marches and prayer meetings may seem insignificant gestures in the face of guns and violence, but for many residents in gang-ridden Hanover Park on the Cape Flats these are the first steps to finding the courage to speak out and act. Hanover Park residents are slowly finding their voice after a […]
dangerous The Reserve Bank has been speaking to the IMF about the fund’s controversial proposal to sell gold for debt relief, reports Mungo Soggot Reserve Bank Governor Chris Stals said this week the gold price had fallen to “dangerously low” levels as South Africa’s top mining magnate and unionist joined forces to lobby against the […]
Alex Sudheim Celebrating its 20th birthday this year is the Durban International Film Festival, one of South Africa’s premier cinematic events. With a programme boasting 30 intriguing examples of alternative cinema from around the globe, the festival is a blessed relief for Durban cinephiles starved of indie action. Since Ster Kinekor’s technocrats deemed the city […]
It’s irritating to be accused of stifling debate while debating. “Aids-denial” scientists are like Holocaust-denial historians. Of course they have a constitutional right to be heard – but Holocaust denial didn’t get cranked up until the 1980s, when every thinking person had known for 40 years that the Holocaust actually happened. Here, the government was […]
Shaun de Waal Low-budget movie of the week In Rose Troche’s debut feature, Go Fish, a lesbian is put on “trial” by her peers for daring to contemplate the idea of sex with a man. This scene seemed to confirm some viewers’ worst fears about lesbians, but Troche’s intention was indubitably satirical. Her satire, though, […]
Matthew Krouse Down the tube Across the world the myth about men is the same – apparently we’re out to get laid all the time. Well, yes and no. Yes, we’d like to be engaged in some form of sexual play our whole lives. But no, we don’t fall apart at the seams if it […]
COMRADES Marathon 1997 champion Charl Mattheus, who withdrew from the down race at Kloof on June 16, is recovering following surgery to reattach his Achilles tendon on Monday. Following the operation, doctors are confident that Mattheus will make a full recovery and will be back on the road by early next year. “I am determined […]
Mungo Soggot ASecond Look A few weeks before the election, a foreign diplomat said that as far as his government was concerned, the litmus test of the Thabo Mbeki era was going to be what happened to the then Cabinet’s non-performers. The diplomat mentioned only two names – Penuell Maduna, whom he believed had had […]
Once again American actors are starring in a film adaption of a South African play, but Danny Glover used his fame to further the anti-apartheid cause – and he’s a bankable star, writes John Matshikiza Art is about the suspension of belief -or, in a latter-day sophistication of this theme, the suspension of disbelief. You […]
THE Moroccan government has withdrawn permission for the human rights body Amnesty International to hold its annual conference this August in Rabat, Amnesty said on Thursday. Some 400 delegates from Amnesty were to have spent 10 days in the Moroccan capital, the first time that an Arab country had agreed to host the rights body’s […]
John Sutherland George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which was released in South Africa this week, generated so much hype worldwide there was bound to be a backlash. One character, Jar Jar Binks, a computer-birthed frogboy, has been indicted of that most heinous culture crime: racist stereotyping. Jar Jar (created on screen by “animatics”) […]
Cameron Duodu Letter from the North It is gratifying to learn that Sierra Leone’s President Alhaji Tejan Kabbah is about to bring the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) into his government. There is no doubt that the RUF and its leader, Foday Sankoh, are among the most sadistic murderers on the African continent. […]
Angela Neustatter Body Language Mid-life isn’t what it used to be. The days when women of a certain age were expected to fade into the wallpaper, wearing beige crimplene and accepting they had reached their sell-by date, are no more than a memory. And what has caused this disruption of the definition of mid-life? The […]
Matthew Krouse, who once portrayed Dimitri Tsafendas in a play, looks at Lisa Key’s extraordinary documentary on the man who murdered Verwoerd I know what it feels like to kill Hendrik Verwoerd. I killed him often in 1985, when I acted as Dimitri Tsafendas in a musical satire I wrote with Robert Colman, who played […]
Time contains every paradox. It heals all wounds, but it wounds all heels. It shrinks, it stretches, it flies, it drags. It varies relativistically according to the speed of the observer. It is measured in years, but even years have to be subdivided into tropical years, or anomalistic years, or Great Years. Aeons are counted […]
Shaun Harris Taking Stock The latest, long-awaited interest rate cut should have us all ecstatic. The drop in prime and home-loan lending rates from 19% to 18% certainly seemed to please some people, typically those commentators who herald every rate cut, drop in inflation and rise in gross domestic product as the dawn of a […]
wave David Gough in Nairobi Armed vigilante groups are springing up throughout the Kenyan capital in response to a rising crime rate that has made the once peaceful city one of the most dangerous in Africa. Community leaders say that chronic unemployment, a corrupt and ineffective police force, increases in food prices and rising levels […]