Mercedes Sayagues Unita’s artillery rumbled 5km away. Malanje was surrounded. Panic ensued. The airport was swept by people desperate to get on a relief plane bound for Luanda. The Antonov had little safe time for take- off. Manuel’s mother lifted him over her head. A hand pulled him up on board. While his mother scrambled […]
TWO journalists in Malawi have been charged with inciting mutiny over a report on elections held last week, court sources said Thursday. Editor Horace Somanje and reporter Mabvuto Banda of the opposition newspaper the Malawi News pleaded not guilty to the charge Wednesday and were released on bail. The trial is expected to begin sometime […]
Justin Arenstein `Welcome to the bantustan” was the refrain echoing through Mpumalanga’s corridors of power this week following the virtual coup of the provincial government by former homeland leaders. The echoes will ring even louder if former KaNgwane homeland minister and discredited former environmental MEC David Mkhwanazi is appointed as special adviser to the premier. […]
Mercedes Sayagues The Supreme Court of Zimbabwe has lashed back at women’s groups critical of a recent ruling that used customary law to deny a woman the right to inherit. In May, activists protested that the ruling undermined women’s rights in Zimbabwe and narrowed the interpretation of the Legal Age Majority Act of 1982, which […]
respect you’ Sarah Ruden Okay, okay – don’t forget the United States entirely. You need those tourists, and you need foreign direct investment. But the irony is that economic progress is not going to happen if the South African government is craven in following advice from abroad. Current American economic policy, even as applied in […]
PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki and Organisation of African Unity secretary-general Salim Ahmed Salim will address a conference on the theme of an African revival in Johannesburg in October, organisers said on Thursday. Former South African and Tanzanian presidents Nelson Mandela and Julius Nyerere, as well as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, are among those who have […]
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”) […]
RESCUE services were searching the sea off Angola’s southwest coast on Wednesday after a helicopter carrying a senior Angolan government official and at least four other people failed to arrive at its destination, an official said. Deputy Interior Minister Dario Ngongo was on board a police helicopter that left Luanda on Tuesday en route to […]
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 […]
CHARLES MANGWIRO, Maputo | Friday 2.45pm. REGIONAL governments must begin involving rural communities in the management of natural resources if they wish to avoid cross-border water conflicts, European and African resource managers said in Maputo on Friday. The managers told delegates from nine southern African countries that water remained the region’s scarcest and most desirable […]
Larry Elliott in Cologne The World Bank is wooing the world’s biggest drugs companies with a multibillion dollar package of guarantees to encourage the development of a low-cost Aids vaccine for poor countries. Alarmed by the relentless spread of the HIV virus, the bank is proposing the creation of a global health insurance programme to […]
Marianne Merten Deputy justice minister Cheryl Gillwald was job-hunting when she heard the news of her appointment. She now laughs about it. When Gillwald realised she was not on the party list for re-election to Parliament she sent out her curriculum vitae. “I started job- hunting. I did quite a lot of hunting – I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Community management of natural resources is all the rage among conservationists. But is it really working, asks Saliem Fakir To promote the sustainable use of natural resources and to maximise benefits for rural communities, several community-based natural resource management projects have been initiated in South Africa, mainly by foreign donor agencies. These projects aim to […]
Shaun de Waal Big-budget movie of the week `See it again!” the Star Wars faithful are urging each other on the Net. “It gets better!” This is partly to ensure that Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace breaks Titanic’s record, but also to help them get over the disappointment of the first viewing. Disappointment […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 Matshikiza With The Lid Off I met Danny Glover in the Sheraton hotel in Harare in 1986. It was a bitterly cold winter’s morning, the sun had not yet come up, and we were gathering in the lobby of the hotel, waiting to go on to the set to shoot a made-for-TV movie called […]
Talk of healing is premature. There is still so much blood sloshing around that it’s impossible to see the size of the wound, let alone ascertain how best to deal with it. Anyone who has ever had experience of shock or trauma victims will have recognised some of the signs in Hansie Cronje’s team on […]
Mail & Guardian reporter Massi Delle Donne (27) is the first winner of the Mail & Guardian’s MBA scholarship to the Rotterdam School of Management. He met the academic who facilitated the general management study programme, Professor Wil Foppen, in Cape Town earlier this week. Foppen was in town to meet several academics and squeeze […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ivor Powell Nosizwe Madlala-Routledge, the newly appointed deputy minister of defence, is no militaristic hawk or securocrat. She’s a self-professed pacifist – and a practising member of the Society of Friends or Quaker movement. She is married to Jeremy Routledge, the director of the Quaker Peace Centre in Cape Town. In the 1980s the centre […]
The David Gleason Column `There are three kinds of lies,” said British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, “lies, damned lies and statistics.” So, when the South African Statistical Service (SASS)- let it be said with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Finance and, no doubt, the Reserve Bank, too -produces an entirely revised set of […]
Fiona Macleod Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi- Mahanyele is talking about starting a revolution in her second term of office. “We’ve laid the foundations, the building blocks are in place and a social revolution is about to start,” she says. “Our society is changing, and housing is one of the factors contributing towards that change.” […]
Peter Dickson Impoverished rural Transkei faces a “real possibility of famine” unless there is large-scale government intervention, welfare groups warn. Transkei Land Services Organisation acting director Simphiwe Ntshweni says widespread crop neglect and drought in the province is a recipe for disaster. “The government should revive the parastatals and introduce irrigation schemes on a large […]
Xolela Mangcu Guest Column Five years ago I invited Sam Nolutshungu and Mamphela Ramphele to Cornell University to discuss South Africa’s prospects for democracy. I remember complaining to Nolutshungu about the overtly political nature of Cabinet appointments in our first democratically elected government. I wanted people to be appointed on the basis of their knowledge […]
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 […]