OWN CORRESPONDENT, Leeds | Sunday 8.00pm. STEVE Waugh played yet another masterful innings to lead Australia into the semi-finals of the World Cup on Sunday, scoring an unbeaten 120 as his team reached 272 for five to beat South Africa by five wickets in a Headingley thriller. The result means the two rivals will meet […]
ONE person was killed and 25 wounded when gunmen opened fire on a group of people enjoying a braai at Hanover Park in Cape Town late on Saturday, police said. Police spokesman Captain Neville Malila said Sunday the occupants of two cars drove past a house in Hanover Park and opened fire with an automatic […]
NIGERIAN President Olusegun Obasanjo Monday sacked the head of the state-run electricity company, National Electric Power Authority (Nepa), and three of the company’s executive directors, his office announced. Obasanjo ordered the dismissal of Hamza Ibrahim and approved the resignation of the executive directors of generation, transmission and engineering, finance and accounts, and distribution and marketing. […]
FIFTEEN southern African and Indian Ocean island countries on Friday adopted a health cooperation plan for disease prevention and control. The World Health Organisation said the “health cooperation framework and action plan” was agreed upon at the end of a five-day meeting in Harare of the countries’ health and interior ministers. The WHO said the […]
VETERAN human rights campaigner Ellen Khuzwayo, who was admitted to hospital after collapsing on election day last week, was on Friday still “very ill” and being assessed on a 24-hour basis. Khuzwayo, (84) who was admitted to the Tshepo Themba Hospital in Dobsonville, Soweto, is undergoing a series of tests to ascertain the nature of […]
FOUR teenagers who were convicted of murder on Thursday will be medically tested to verify their claim that they are under 18, and minors in the eyes of the law. The Nelspruit Regional Court found that the four, along with Mathews Thabe (18) murdered Amos Nkosi (46) on March 15 after Nkosi refused to move […]
OW CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Friday 7.00pm NEW National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s office in Parliament stood empty on Friday afternoon, stripped of everything but government-issue furniture in preparation for its new occupant — Democratic Party leader Tony Leon. The drawers of the imposing wooden desk, with inlaid fake-leather writing pad, yawned open; an […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kinshasa | Saturday 5.00pm. DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo (DRC) President Laurent Kabila called late on Friday for total war against neighbouring Rwanda, the main backer of a 10-month-old rebellion against his government. “The Congolese people must arm themselves. The war must be total,” Kabila said on state radio after talks with Namibian President […]
SOUTH Africa were still favourities Australia’s odds to win the World Cup were cut to 5-2 from 3-1 following their 44-run win over Zimbabwe on Wednesday. But bookmakers William Hill still made Australia only third favourites to win the tournament which ends on June 20. Latest odds: 6-4 South Africa 9-4 Pakistan 5-2 Australia 12-1 […]
SARAH BULLEN, Cape Town | Thursday 8.00pm JAY NAIDOO has quit as Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting and will be leaving parliamentary politics at the end of his current term of office, the African National Congress announced on Thursday. The ANC said in a statement that Naidoo is leaving active political life due to […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 12noon SENIOR Inkatha Freedom Party official Philip Powell is under investigation for treason. The probe follows Powell’s exposure last month of a huge cache of explosives and ammunition in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Powell led police to seven tons of heavy weaponry and ammunition near the IFP stronghold of Ulundi. The arsenal […]
Marianne Merten and Howard Barrell When the new Western Cape provincial legislature rises on Tuesday, little will have changed, despite the African National Congress having won the biggest share of votes in the election. This week, the ANC refused an offer of one seat in the 12-seat provincial cabinet. Opposition parties who have agreed on […]
A caller to a local radio station last week suggested that the franchise be taken away from white people for a period so that the black majority can get on with the business of political contestation free from the bogey of race. Her reasoning is that after 10 years, once the playing fields have been […]
John Arlidge and Jamie Doward The Internet, once dubbed the Wild West of the 21st century, is getting its first taste of the law: an electronic sheriff is surfing cyberspace. Big firms, which are losing up to 3-million each a year as workers surf the Web looking for new jobs and downloading pornography, are set […]
Loose cannon Robert Kirby `The time has come for work.” The muted but somehow resonant assurance with which Mr Thabo Mbeki closed off his “victory speech” at Gallagher Estate; a speech which, uncommonly for any latter-born politician, expressed more by virtue of its restraint than its rhetoric. To even the most gloomy of sceptics, Mbeki’s […]
Wonder Hlongwa Against police denials that there was a political motive in the killing of two women in KwaZulu-Natal’s volatile Richmond area, the families of the deceased insist they were indeed political. The two women, Zantu Ndabezitha (40) and Babongile Dlamini (43), were gunned down in separate incidents eight hours before Wednesday’s elections. The families […]
Several familiar faces are missing from the South African team to meet Italy on Saturday – and their replacements have the talent to keep them on the sidelines, writes Andy Capostagno Nine changes and four uncapped players on the bench. You could be forgiven for thinking that Nick Mallett has gone mad. But it is […]
Marianne Merten Voting is still a tale of two cities on the Cape Peninsula where just a busy highway makes all the difference. In the coloured area of Bonteheuwel on the Cape Flats, residents spent election day at home, visiting friends and making the best of an extra public holiday in the little gardens where […]
Neil Manthorp reports from Birmingham on Zimbabwe’s progress in the World Cup Zimbabwe’s rousing progress towards a probable semi-final place has been explained away in these parts by everything from a faulty format to a Southern African conspiracy. The truth is, however, they have worked as hard as any other team here and with far […]
Mail & Guardian reporter If you are going to be at work on the night of December 31 1999, then cash and how to get lots of it will be uppermost in your mind. Bonuses are likely to be low, however, where demand for places is high. So the first trick is to make sure […]
Libby Young The two best known “facts” about the Internet are that most people are looking for sex online, and that finding what you’re looking for is very difficult. This, of course, could be true of life in general, but as with life these facts are not always as hard and fast as they seem. […]
Friday night Matthew Simpson Wi-i-ind down. Another week in the trenches has come to an end and I’m lying on my bed, sucking a cigarette, hoping Shan won’t notice when she gets home, because smoking in the bedroom is strictly forbidden. Right now, though, I couldn’t care less. I’m making plans. In fact, the plans […]
Anthony Sampson A Second Look How different will South Africa really be after the June 2 election? Nelson Mandela’s successor Thabo Mbeki is so opposite in style that the contrast with his predecessor seems dramatic: he is short, introverted, intellectual, preferring to deal behind the scenes rather than lead from the front as Mandela did: […]
Ivor Powell, Wally Mbhele and Wonder Hlongwa While the African National Congress is confident that there is agreement with the Inkatha Freedom Party that its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, will be South Africa’s next deputy president, the IFP is still being coy. ANC sources say Buthelezi is expected to accept the position within days, with only […]
WEDNESDAY, 12.30PM: FORMER South African cricket great Jackie McGlew died at his Craighall Park home on Tuesday after a long battle against leukemia. McGlew (69) captained South Africa in 14 test matches between 1947 and 1967. His score of 255 not-out against New Zealand is the second highest international score ever recorded. McGlew’s first-class career […]
Howard Barrell Over a Barrel Who said life beyond the Hex River Mountains was boring? Long the home of the best wine, the worst dagga (I’m told) and the most picturesque beaches, the Western Cape has just confirmed its place as the habitat of eccentricity. The rest of the country may choose to hand themselves […]
According to a recent study, the rape homicide rate in Cape Town is 12 times higher than in the United States. Charlene Smith reports In the photograph is a beautiful young woman sitting with her boyfriend. It is a 21st-birthday photograph. Six years before she was raped so violently with a sharp object in her […]
The winner of the Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammet award is not a standard academic, reports Mercedes Sayagues Judged on her writings alone, Dr Patricia McFadden appears to be an African Valkyrie in metal breast-plates, who sees the world through rigid prisms of gender and race. But when you meet her, she is a warm woman with […]
In 1918, at the age of 40, my maternal grandfather was stricken by a form of viral influenza, popularly known as the Spanish flu, which was decimating much of Europe. Within a week, despite the best efforts of three physicians, he died. In 1972, at the age of 40, I was stricken by a serious […]
cell Evidence wa ka Ngobeni The police’s Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) is probing the mysterious death of a man who shot himself in a police cell this week after being arrested for a minor crime. Police claim that Francois Hulscher (30), from Cape Town, pumped a bullet from a 9mm pistol into his head just […]
You write a novel, the proof copies get passed around, panic sets in. Will they like it? Is it well enough written? Did I do justice to the characters? You wait to hear the cut and thrust of intellectual argument spearing down your literary faults. But no, what I got instead was quiet corner confessions […]
South Africa’s second democratic election saw the virtual extinction of the party that invented apartheid, writes Howard Barrell The African National Congress scored an emphatic victory at the polls this week, soaring beyond the two-thirds majority threshold in an election widely acclaimed by international observers. And in one of the most remarkable recoveries in modern […]