Staff Reporter

Howard Barrell Over a Barrel We South Africans may have scored something of a first this week in the annals of foreign policy-making. We may well be the only country ever to complete what appears to be a full-scale somersault in foreign policy and to invade a neighbouring state while our president, deputy president, foreign […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 7.00pm. FORMER Pan Africanist Congress president Clarence Makwetu has been reinstated as a member of the party and as an MP, but will resign his seat with immediate effect and retire from active politics. Makwetu was accused of sowing disunity in the PAC and his membership was suspended for three […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kampala | Friday 9.30pm. A PROCESS of selection forced by poaching and hunting has resulted in elephants in western Uganda becoming “tuskless”, a scientist with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, Eve Lawino Abe, said on Friday. Some 15% of the adult female elephants in the Queen Elizabeth National Park are being born without tusks […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby Everybody said it wouldn’t work and they were right, but it is still sad to see Dawie Snyman being shown the door for not taking the Golden Lions to the semi-finals of the Currie Cup. When Snyman was appointed last June it was widely believed that he had been brought up from […]

Jane Rosenthal MOTHER TO MOTHER by Sindiwe Magona (David Phillip); UNBROKEN WING by Bridget Pitt (Kwela ) In the 1980s a cartoon figure of a stout and immovable Black Sash lady with fist held aloft, subtitled “Womandla!” was created by poet and cartoonist, Gus Ferguson. It was an inspired conjunction of black and white resistance […]

Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week `A chinese box doesn’t really exist,” said director Wayne Wang in an interview with Hollywood Online. “I tried to find one … I looked everywhere, but it doesn’t exist. It’s a metaphor for a box which, when you open it, leads to another box, then you open that box […]

y So Craig Williamson wishes he was James Bond and a generation of aspirant psychos model themselves on Hannibal Lecter. Maggie Davey listened to American theorist Mark Seltzer on the concept of a `wound culture’ Did Craig Williamson really have to reassure us that spying for the apartheid government was no James Bond fantasy? You […]

Nic Paul On show in Durban What becomes of the sons of great men? Greatness seldom strikes the same family twice, and almost never one generation after the next (some South African examples, like the Tutus and the Ruperts come easily to mind here) and it’s an interesting question which Mahatma vs Gandhi doesn’t try […]

Raymond Joseph Police say Mark Thatcher will be subpoenaed as a state witness in the fraud and theft trial of officers who acted as “bookrunners” for his failed money-lending business. Police say 11 of Thatcher’s runners have been identified. At least three runners will appear in court by the middle of next month, and others […]

Ever been allowed into a movie for free and been allowed to drink beer and talk when you want to? Jean Barker visited Cape Town’s BioCafe Beers are R3, entrance is free, and everyone is at the BioCafe on Wednesday evenings long before the short film screening starts, chatting and drinking. The chatting and drinking […]

Peter Dickson More than R300-million in taxpayers’ money is owed in unauthorised, outstanding loans to senior civil servants in the Eastern Cape. This disclosure comes a week after provincial speaker Gugile Nkwinti suspended two officials who had cashed in more than R300 000 in air tickets for members of the legislature without authorisation. The legislature’s […]

Mungo Soggot The Office of the Auditor General has appointed an oil trading expert from London to probe the government’s sale of about R2- billion worth of oil earlier this year. The government quietly sold off 25-million barrels – the bulk of South Africa’s strategic oil stock – in March and transferred R800-million of the […]

Robert Potts SIMPLICITY by Edward de Bono (Viking) Edward de Bono’s many, many books include Conflicts: A Better Way to Solve Them; Handbook for the Positive Revolution; How To Be More Interesting; and Teach Yourself to Think. These seem to have sold extremely well, both to human beings and also to (the apparent target audience) […]

Mike Finch Commonwealth Games South Africa’s track and field athletes returned home from the Commonwealth Games on Tuesday clutching 11 medals – their biggest haul at a major event since returning to the international scene in 1993. Unfortunately, only one of the medallists was black. Olympic 800m runner Hezekiel Sepeng, almost a veteran member of […]

Sechaba ka’Nkosi Mutinous Lesotho Defence Force (LDF) soldiers sympathetic to opposition parties are removing arms from military bases in preparation for a prolonged war against the allied forces of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The soldiers have retreated strategically to the mountains where they have been able to delay the fall of their Makonyane […]

Cameron Duodu: FIRST PERSON Just before President Bill Clinton set off on his March/April tour of Africa that brought him to South Africa, Ghanaian writer Cameron Duodu sent Clinton an open letter, urging Clinton to avail himself of the opportunity offered by the tour to put the Monica Lewinsky affair in its correct perspective. Duodu […]

Alex Duval Smith The smouldering remains of Lesotho, a kingdom raped of its constitutional integrity after South Africa’s heavy-handed military intervention, lie as visible proof of the post-apartheid government’s disastrous foreign policy. Political analysts believe that it is chiefly South Africa’s failure, since elections in 1994, to invent a credible role for itself in Africa […]

Peter Frost On show in Cape Town They’re celebrating. The State Theatre Ballet and Cape Town City Ballet’s (CTCB) inaugural joint venture has succeeded. In an evening characterised by energy and verve, the combined companies took on two “imported” works and one home-grown piece, each quite different from the other. Few people held out much […]

Mail & Guardian reporter Apart from pornography, keeping up with the news, and monitoring the latest on Zippergate, the Internet can also provide a playground for a budding George Soros. Local and international financial service websites are rapidly expanding. Their offerings range from basic financial information to trading a portfolio on the Web. Internationally people […]

Wonder Hlongwa The Yeoville Community Development Forum has a dream: it wants to see the streets of greater Yeoville cleared of crime and grime. It wants to create an environment that encourages economic, social and cultural development in the cosmopolitan community in eastern Johannesburg. The forum unveiled its dream at a brain- storming workshop this […]

A school that fought apartheid is threatened with closure. John Pilger believes it should be saved Those of us banned from South Africa during the apartheid years have returning snapshots that swell the heart, offering a glimpse of what the future might be. One of mine is from a recent visit to Woodmead High School, […]

Wally Mbhele Azanian People’s Liberation Army commander Phila Dolo was granted amnesty last week by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for killing a policeman and possession of a firearm and ammunition. He had been serving a life sentence. But the commission postponed a decision on Dolo’s plea for amnesty in the 1993 Eikenhof massacre in […]

Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg `Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson,” reads a note in the programme for the South African premiere of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, a mesmerising new production that took to the Market Theatre stage last week. It was the “to teach […]

As mutinous Lesotho troops take to the hills in preparation for a drawn-out struggle, we re-examine the report that caused all the trouble William Boot The Southern African Development Community’s mishandling of the Langa commission of inquiry and its inability to publicly admit that the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD)had fraudulently stolen the May 23 […]

Barbara Ludman POINT OF ORIGIN by Patricia Cornwell (Little, Brown) Patricia Cornwell’s life generally spills over into her books. In this one, it threatens to take the book over. She’s made a background theme of the FBI’s prurient interest in its agents’ affairs ever since she was named as co-respondent in a divorce suit lodged […]

Howard Barrell A group of leading South African scientists is putting together a R50- million project to develop a vaccine to fight what Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and others have called the country’s gravest threat, the HIV/Aids epidemic. The scientists believe South Africa has a window of opportunity in which to develop a vaccine which […]

KHAREEN PECH, Johannesburg | Friday 1.00pm. A WEALTHY rightwinger linked to arms cartels and several rebel groups in Africa plans to destabilise South Africa in the run-up to the country’s second democratic elections in 1999. Former Civilian Co-operation Bureau operative Johan Niemller is directing preparations by the “Boerevolk” for a “Fourth Boere Revolution” by galvanising […]

Is Camille Paglia duffing up the right-on `feminazis’ on behalf of bad girls everywhere? Or is she peddling outdated, simplistic views completely out of touch with the Nineties? Angela Phillips on the working-class motormouth who enrages as much as she engages This should have been Camille Paglia’s week. The woman who put the sex back […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kimberly | Friday, 8.00pm. GRIQUAS showed a sensational first-half score run in which they scored six tries, and then went on to notch up a definite 64-7 win over Mpumalanga Pumas in their Bankfin Currie Cup rugby match at the Absa Park stadium on Friday. Griquas led 36-0 at halftime. It was man […]

Khareen Pech A right-wing millionaire linked to weapons cartels and rebel armies in Africa is at the forefront of a bizarre plot to destabilise South Africa before the 1999 general elections. Former Civilian Co- operation Bureau (CCB) operative Johan Niemoeller is planning a fervent campaign he calls the “Fourth Boere Revolution” to “reimpose white Afrikaner […]

Ferial Haffajee TopSport chief executive officer Edward Griffiths has landed a cushy agreement with the SABC which would see him working in South Africa for one week a month. The SABC has met negotiators who want to buy TopSport – its basket of television sports programmes – which is about to make a profit for […]

Paul Whelan and David Schmidt Across the world, societies wrestle with the problems of how best to govern their metropolitan conurbations, so critical to national economies and the livelihoods of millions of people. Metropolitan governance is a difficult and rather messy affair. Metros are complex, they tend to concentrate major social problems, they outgrow their […]