Andrew Worsdale Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal’s major visionary film-maker, died last week after a long fight against throat cancer. Mambety was, without doubt, Africa’s most fanciful film-maker – the only man who treated African stories with the lateral cinematic vision they crave. Starting his movie-making in 1968 with Contras-City, dubbed the first African comedy, the […]
Roger Cohen in Abuja `Look, the human rights here in Nigeria are terrible,” Theodore Luttwak says, “but the opportunities are just fantastic … where else in the world do you have so much money?” Good question. Abuja, Nigeria’s capital- under-construction, is full of the whiff of oil money, and not just at the exclusive golf […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 11.00AM. THE 1998 Castle Premiership soccer season starts on Friday night, and the first weekend will see some interesting match-ups. The weekend schedule is: Friday: Cape Town Spurs vs Mamelodi Sundowns in Cape Town. Saturday: Moroka Swallows vs Seven Stars at the George Gogh Stadium in Johannesburg. Manning Rangers vs […]
Richard Hall Joseph Conrad described one of his villains as a “papier-mch Mephistopheles”. That was the image of Tiny Rowland, who has died aged 80. His secretive nature and mocking smile seemed to fit perfectly with Edward Heath’s descriptive tag: “An unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism”. Despite his Old Etonian airs, Rowland was born […]
Greig Coetzee’s plays have shown alternative sides of the male psyche. Denise rack Louw probed him about his characters `For me, writing is a passion. At times it can also be a pain in the ass; but, like eating and sleeping it’s something I simply have to do,” says Greig Coetzee, author and executor of […]
TRISH MURPHY, Johannesburg | Friday 4.30PM. THE Angolan government is preparing for a full-scale offensive against Unita rebels, sources in Luanda and elsewhere in Angola report. Although Luanda denies it is preparing for war, it is also reported to be recruiting, as is Unita. Angolan president Eduardo Dos Santos this week was in France, and […]
Angella Johnson View From a Broad I don’t get it. Shirley MacLaine was an Egyptian princess in one of her past lives. Other people became Napoleon, or some other historical great. But me: I got to be some illiterate, forest-dwelling nobody living in the England of 1066. I was a peasant called Phil (mmm, doesn’t […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Dan Mabote, accused of raping, abducting and then killing seven-year-old Mamokgethi Malebana, may soon get his just reward. But family and friends of Mamokgethi say people who aided her killing, albeit inadvertently, will get off scot-free. “I blame the people who granted him bail,” says Mamokgethi’s mother, Joyce Malebana. “I want something to […]
Denise Rack Louw Musicians of the Rainbow Nation will be strumming their stuff in Portugal on August 3 for South Africa’s national day at Lisbon Expo `98 – the last world exposition of the 20th century. The expo, which runs until September 30, is expected to attract 16 million visitors from around the world. About […]
Gill Moodie The battle for your brain has arrived in South Africa as an international campaign over health fears linked to cellphone use begins to target local consumers. Leading the way in convincing local users that cellphone calls may be frying your brain is Johannesburg-based Radiation Cellutions, the local importers of Microshield, a British product […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 11.00AM. STATE herald Fred Brownell said on Thursday that former South African Rugby Football Union boss Louis Luyt cannot claim the Springbok emblem to be his own. Luyt earlier charged that the emblem belongs to him, saying: “It was designed by me, it belongs to me.” Brownell said that a […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 11.00PM. THE Free State Cheetahs stormed home to beat Border 36-18 in a Bankfin Currie Cup rugby clash in Bloemfontein on Friday night after leading 18-12 at the break. The inclusion of three Springbok players — Werner Swanepoel, Willie Meyer and Naka Drotske — in the Free State side made […]
Jackie Bennion When Internet darling Yahoo! announced its second-quarter earnings earlier this month, it not only sent Wall Street into a frenzy; it also made the founders of the Web search site, Jerry Yang and David Filo, the latest additions to the Billionaire Boys Club. Two weeks ago, Broadcast.com went public with the biggest opening […]
George Steiner EXPLAINING HITLER by Ron Rosenbaum (Macmillan) It may well be that I am not the right reviewer for this book. Ron Rosenbaum places me and my novel, The Portage to San Christobal of AH, among the principal players in his dark tale. Explaining Hitler, a highly personal study of those who have sought […]
Ferial Haffajee Membership of The Network is coveted. It’s the hottest club in town and counts the country’s leading business, intellectual and political talents in its midst. The Network has reportedly come out of the closet, partying last week to celebrate the appointment of Tito Mboweni as Reserve Bank governor-designate. It was as much a […]
Douglas Rushkoff : online Gathered together beneath the chandeliers of the Beverly Hilton’s main ballroom earlier this year, Hollywood’s best and brightest (dressed, anyway) had paid about $1 500 each to rub elbows with the interactive media-makers who would soon, they feared, replace them. Meanwhile, a demonstration floor crowded with technology from Compaq and other […]
Chris Roper `They’re good enough to make it internationally”. Yeah, right. How many times have you heard that ill-fated mantra pronounced over local bands? And nothing ever happens, especially if you’re situated in that genre known disparagingly as whiteboy rock, but which includes a couple of women and the odd black person. The reasons for […]
Keith Henderson CD of the week What a job -putting together an album for The X-Files movie. According to director Chris Carter, none of the artists on the album had been given the opportunity to see the film before going into the studio to record. But then again, who needs to see the movie when […]
Donna Block : Share World Not too long ago, Latin America’s stock markets were like the Brazilian carnival dancers: sexy with a whole lot of shaking going on. From 1986 to 1996 no emerging markets were hotter than the Latinos. But the region once described as the emerging-market poster child has grown warts and facial […]
Looking at Ralph Steadman’s caustic caricatures you’d be forgiven for thinking that he is one of the world’s angriest men But, deep down, he tells Sally Vincent, that’s all because he’s only really angry with one thing: himself. Something terrible has happened. The air is full of inaudible squeaks of post-holocaust bats’ ghosts. I had […]
Alex Dodd – Milan, Marseille, New York, Rotterdam A short, hard-hitting film about xenophobia in the heart of Johannesburg by local film- maker Zola Maseko has been playing to thunderous applause around the world. This is the first time a film by a black South African director has achieved such widespread international acclaim. The Foreigner […]
Keith Henderson : Live in Johannesburg The queue for the Springbok Nude Girls outside the Roxy Rhythm Bar, Melville, was the kind which makes you feel it would be a lot easier to turn around and go home. There was probably at least one thing on television last Saturday that you could’ve fooled yourself into […]
Andrew Worsdale Two movies open this week that show and show-up middle-class values. They savage the bourgeoisie as comfortable claptrap who, ironically enough, will be the ones who go to the art movie houses (where both films are being released) to see themselves being represented and slagged off. The first is The Happy War, a […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 9.00PM. THE Richmond killers have been identified as a five-man hit-squad with military backgrounds, SABC3 has reported. Their leader is known to speak Afrikaans fluently, and police have been searching for them for a year already in connection with previous massacres. Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi announced the news […]
Marthali Brand went to the opening of Graceland, the garish new casino in Mpumalanga Why is it that all roads to South African casinos lead through squatter camps? On my way to the opening of the first fully functional casino in the new South Africa, all I could think of as our luxury coach travelled […]
Dan Glaister : First Person John Bayley has written a moving elegy to his wife, the writer Iris Murdoch, in the New Yorker magazine. It is a tale of two swimming trips to the same river near Oxford, United Kingdom. Two trips punctuated by a space of 40 years, and haunted by Alzheimer’s disease. “With […]
Ed Vulliamy in Washington : Basketball After six Naitional Basketball Association (NBA) championships – the latest won in an epic final series against Utah Jazz last month – Americans are accustomed to gravity-defying acrobatics from the Chicago Bulls. But not of this kind. Last Thursday afternoon, the Bulls managed a contortion which beats almost any […]
Robert Kirby : Loose Cannon I never thought the day would arrive when I would want to see some no-nonsense killer censorship deployed. But it did arrive, quite recently, with the exhibition in Grahamstown of what a lot of people believe is little more than child pornography going as art. Alas, the head of the […]
John Ezard Climactic warming has destroyed part of the gigantic Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica. Final disintegration and melting of the 19 500km2 shelf is now predicted within two years. The crack-up, disclosed by a satellite photograph taken on March 23, confirmed and sharpened nearly a decade of anxiety about trends in a region […]
Marion Jones is aiming for five golds in the 2000 Olympics. Duncan Mackay reports on an athletics phenomenon When Florence Griffith Joyner set world records for the 100m and 200m a decade ago experts predicted they were so far ahead of their time that they would stand for 50 years. But the emergence of Marion […]
Adam Haupt If you’re one of those people who thinks that Steve Newman and Tony Cox are the only acoustic guitar virtuosos around, you’ve been lied to. It’s no sordid conspiracy, though. It’s just that Leslie Jovan sees himself as a community worker and not a musician. To him music is a vehicle for other […]
Chris Gordon in Luanda and Howard Barrell in Cape Town Angola’s return to arms, which appeared inevitable this week, could spill into neighbouring territories and destabilise the entire Southern African region. In the line of fire are Zambia, which the Unita rebel movement continues to use as a rear supply base and which is bracing […]