Charlotte Raven First Person Another day, another report confirming men’s supposed oppression. This time, the global crisis as men across four continents confess to being annoyed that they’re not getting enough attention. According to a study by Research International, men are feeling unappreciated. Women hardly acknowledge them, except to laugh and point. On the odd […]
Wally Mbhele The credibility of the police and the prosecution – led by the Transvaal Attorney General, Jan d’Oliviera – has come under heavy assault from lawyers defending three African National Congress members who were convicted for the 1993 Eikenhof massacre. Fresh evidence pointing to prior police knowledge of the identity of the real perpetrators […]
Black empowerment threatens to turn South Africa into another East Asia, writes Ben Turok President Nelson Mandela’s recent statement at the National Council of Provinces that he will root out of the government “those who betray the calling of the public service” and who enrich themselves, and his attack on the culture of entitlement, gives […]
Swapna Prabhakaran The tale of Cato Manor has always been a tragedy – an old South African tale haunted by the horror of forced removals and the ghosts of families split asunder. Old men remember it with nostalgia as a once special place and a community which was crushed to nothing under the weight of […]
Stuart Hess Support for former African National Congress Western Cape leader Allan Boesak waned swiftly this week as his trial got under way in the Cape High Court. When Boesak returned from the United States last year to face fraud and theft charges, thousands of supporters welcomed him at the airport. He was greeted with […]
Robert Kirby: Loose cannon I find myself quite amazed at the runaway spending of people who suddenly acquire a great deal of money. It’s quite baffling that someone who wins six or seven million tax-free quid on a lottery, can squander the entire bundle inside a couple of years. Sure, a fancy new car and […]
the mould Carolize Jansen Women in sport Cast your mind back to the little statuettes of sports players Shell distributed last year. Can you recall how many of those statuettes were of women? To refresh your memory, just one. Of Penny Heyns. Does that mean that there is only one sportswoman of note in South […]
pull-out John Grobler Insurance companies operating in Namibia are threatening to pull out before the implementation of controversial legislation analysts say will spell the beginning of the end of Namibia’s market economy. The Long-Term Re-Insurance Act will require the companies to pay increasing amounts of their income on premiums to the government. Sanlam (Namibia) managing […]
Iden Wetherell He is being compared to Britain’s combative wartime leader Winston Churchill in local media tributes which border on the hagiographical. But whether this proves to be President Robert Mugabe’s finest hour ultimately depends on the outcome of the war he is busy directing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a decision that […]
Robert Kirby ONE MIRACLE IS NOT ENOUGH by Rex van Schalkwyk (Bellwether) About a quarter of the way through Rex van Schalkwyk’s very disquieting book I had moments of a curious temporal shift. So much of what I had been reading could well be the Kafkaesque testimony presented to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of, […]
Niki Barker The Dukuduku State Forest near the St Lucia estuary in northern KwaZulu- Natal used to be the largest and best- preserved remnant of lowland coastal forest in Southern Africa. It is now an important component of the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park, a proposed World Heritage site. But it is being cleared and […]
possessions Peter Dickson How the mighty have fallen. Once he was a president who ruled with an iron finger. Today PW Botha is a pitiful old man, forced to pawn his prized trinkets in order to pay for his stubbornness. A week before his sentencing in the George Magistrates Court for refusing to testify before […]
Alex Sudheim `Make sharp, the picture is on!” yells the usher to the throng of patrons still jostling for popcorn and cooldrinks around the kiosk. Behind him, the 400-seater cinema is packed to capacity as the enormous screen flickers into vivid life. Its a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon in a deserted and windswept Durban city […]
Everyone’s talking about Clinton and Monica, but you’d never know it from Britain’s apolitical comics. American stand-up Scott Capurro wonders why When I flew out of San Francisco three weeks ago, Americans were basking in the warmth of an economically glowing summer. But by the time the plane hit the tarmac in London, Monica Lewinsky […]
Neil Finn: Try Whistling This (Parlophone) The erstwhile Crowded House/Split Enz singer-songwriter could, as the clich goes, sing the phone book and sound good. His eternally yearning tones set him apart from other melodic late- thirtysomethings – though he also happens to write lovely, inexplicably underrated songs. His first solo effort brims with the usual […]
Alex Sudheim On show in Durban Around 10 years ago in Pretoria, architect William Raats was looking at an Australian magazine which featured modern buildings decorated with beautiful Aboriginal art works. He thought to himself: “If only we had something like that here,” upon which he promptly realised that of course we do – and […]
Marlene Burger The alleged plot to assassinate United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjld 37 years ago was the brainchild of at least two British security agencies – MI5 and the Special Operations Executive – and the CIA, top-secret documents show. For once, apartheid’s dirty tricks brigade appears to have been falsely accused of involvement in […]
Ferial Haffajee The SABC board chair, Professor Paulus Zulu, may have acted unilaterally in sacking deputy chief executive Govin Reddy. Some board members sought a negotiated parting of the ways instead of the immediate termination of employment which Zulu penned in his July letter to Reddy. His action has exposed the SABC to a very […]
Gavin Evans General Lothar Neethling has not had a particularly good year; nor such a hot decade either, come to think of it. Previous allegations that he was apartheid South Africa’s poisoner-in- chief have been confirmed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he has emerged as a key player in the former regime’s biological […]
The massacre of species at present rates has baleful consequences for Earth, writes Tim Radford A big fish is about to swim away, forever. The barndoor skate, Raja levis, seems close to extinction. In 1951 research ships found it in 10% of all trawls of the St Pierre Bank in the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland. […]
Carolize Jansen The Sports Information and Science Agency conducted an extensive and enlightening study on the participation of women in sport last year. The main objectives of the study were to obtain the number of women participating in various sports in South Africa, segment the number of these participants in categories according to, for instance, […]
Alex Sudheim `After 10 minutes time you’ll forget you’re watching a screen and you’ll feel like you’re in the same room,” promises Krish Moodley of his unique new venture, the 3-D Picture Palace on Durban’s beachfront. Whether or not you actually want to be in the same room as several dozen grunting, sweating, copulating people […]
The winds of change that have blown through the SABC seem to have bypassed the commissioning department, writes Ferial Haffajee It is 1976 and television has just hit our shores. The Broederbond has decreed that it be a totally bilingual operation. But the problem is there is nary an Afrikaans producer in sight. The commissioning […]
Economists may need a crash rethink of the basic tenets of economic orthodoxy, writes Larry Elliot Another normal week for the global economy. Russia’s on the point of financial meltdown, the Chinese government is battling to stave off devaluation, bankruptcies are up 35% in Japan, stock markets are down almost everywhere, the biggest industrial merger […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby There was a moment when it became clear that South Africa could win the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It was the moment that Stephen Hilditch blew his whistle to signal the end of the match between Swansea and the Springboks on Saturday, November 5 1994; bonfire night. The final score was Swansea […]
Adam Sweeting CD of the week Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have apparently taken umbrage at the fact that the Pearl Jam song Given to Fly vaguely resembles Led Zeppelin’s Going to California. If anybody’s going to lift chunks from the Zep catalogue, which of course bears no resemblance to the work of any bluesmen […]
Matthew Krouse On stage in Johannesburg It’s not difficult to fathom why Andr the Hilarious Hypnotist is one of the biggest hits in town. Like Candid Camera and America’s Funniest Home Videos, his unselfconscious humour appeals to the lowest common denominator, showing the foibles of ordinary people in absurd situations. Andr’s spectacle parades as an […]
Cecil John Rhodes’s bones are in danger of being tossed in the Zambezi, writes Mercedes Sayagues Few places are as charged with spiritual energy as the Matopos hills in Zimbabwe. Granite boulders twist into contorted sculpture, thorny vegetation is splashed with flowers and 20 000-year-old San paintings adorn caves. This is the place to touch […]
Gavin Evans Boxing When you combine the words Namibia and sport, the only connection that springs to mind is Frankie Fredericks. There is, however, another young man – a close friend of the track star as it happens – who believes he’s on track to equal the achievements of his brilliant homeboy: Harry Simon. This […]
Sarah Penny INTO THE HOUSE OF THE ANCESTORS by Karl Maier (John Wiley & Sons) EATING THE FLOWERS OF PARADISE by Kevin Rushby (Constable) Last year Nelson Mandela made the following statement: “The time has come for Africa to take full responsibility for her woes and use the immense collective wisdom it possesses to make […]
Stewart Dalby Spending it It used to be said that television would see an end to newspapers, but newspapers are still with us. Similarly, the computer was supposed to herald the paperless society. What use pens, then? In fact, pens are very much with us and vintage fountain pens are now highly valuable and collectable […]
Adam Mars-Jones GUT SYMMETRIES by Jeanette Winterson (Granta) This novel (now in paperback) from a commendably retiring writer – it is known that she doesn’t read reviews of her work – repeats a number of themes from previous books:the deathliness of habit and the everyday, sexual triangles, a city viewed as phantasmagorical, the serviceability of […]