Rehana Rossouw Personal History The banging on the door came at 4.30am, as usual. As armed policemen surrounded the house, an officious security policeman marched in waving a detention order in terms of emergency legislation. It was July 8 1988 and security policemen were hunting down organisers of a campaign to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 70th […]
Angella Johnson VIEW FROM A BROAD Can you imagine having to strip off to interview someone in the buff? That was the prospect awaiting me when I decided to check out the German population’s proclivity for taking their clothes off in public. “You do realise that you will have to participate?” declared my interpreter Felix, […]
Howard Barrell Over a Barrel Since this story is about the currency markets, let’s engage in a bit of speculation: you are the leader of a middle-income country of little importance to any but the people who live in it. South Africa would be a good example You are trying to transform your country. Your […]
I’d hate to think what would have happened to artist Steven Cohen if he’d waltzed around this year’s national arts festival with his banner decorated with the words: “Give us your children. What we can’t fuck, we eat.” No doubt Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu would have had him for breakfast. Conversely, had […]
Peet Pienaar speaks to fellow-artist Judith Mason Iwent to see Judith Mason on a cold, murky day, and spoke to an artist who seems to have been quietly observing from the sidelines of the art world for quite a while. How would I contextualise her? I know her well, and know that what I know […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Sello Masinyane has been unable to sleep peacefully since July 8. Horrific images keep flashing in his mind; images similar to what happened to James Byrd Jr – a black man killed by Ku Klux Klan followers in Texas last month after being tied to a truck, dragged for kilometres and dismembered. But […]
WEDNEDAY, 12.00NOON: CHERRYL KENNEDY, the white South African woman who has applied for political asylum in Australia on the grounds that she has been persecuted by affirmative action in South Africa, has lost her case. The Australian Refugee Review Tribunal on Wednesday upheld an Immigration Department ruling that she had no grounds for her claims […]
MONDAY, 2.00PM: DEPUTY Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad met a senior Palestinian Liberation Organisation official, executive committee member Faisal Husseini, in East Jerusalem on Sunday. The meeting followed earlier talks with Palestine’s planning and international co-operation minister Nabil Sha’ath and Palestinian legislative assembly speaker Hanan Ashrawi,as well as the Palestinian business association on Saturday. The […]
Suzy Bell Alfred Hitchcock fans will drool, and politically-sussed bhangra-babes will ditch their men for the night to watch award-winning Indian director Mani Ratnam’s film Irwar (The Duo). Yep, it’s the 19th Durban International Film Festival and there’s something for everyone among the 20 feature films and four documentaries. The films are mainly from Britain, […]
Jacques Magliolo If you’re in the enviable position to have enough money to invest in unit trusts, chances are you’ve been encouraged to invest part of your portfolio in bonds. But bonds appear to be complicated, jargon-laden creatures with names like the “benchmark” R150. Actually, they are simply loans. For instance, if the South African […]
FRIDAY, 1.00PM: ROBERT McBRIDE, the Foreign Affairs official arrested in Mozambique three months ago on dubious gun-running charges, has released a statement explaining his side of the affair. McBride says he went to Mozambique to verify claims from Vusi Mbatha (the informer behind the Meiring report) that Alex Huambo, a former supplier of arms to […]
Phillip Kakaza Live music Back in the 1980s South African music made a radical turn – the locally created home-brew kwaito took the music scene by storm. Its tsotsi taal- flavoured lyrics and irrestible dance rhythms are still heard blasting in clubs, shebeens and parties. Recently, much in a similar way, BMG (South Africa) is […]
The extraordinary breadth and variety of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival is both its strength and a disadvantage, writes Alex Dodd from Grahamstown Try putting the contents of the Internet onto a piece of A4 paper and you’ll get a feel for the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown 1998. Eclectic is a […]
Lauren Shantall To reach Heart of Darkness, one must embark on a symbolic journey into the bowels of the hulking 1820 Settlers Monument. There, one will confront an Africa of the past – that mythical place of the European imagination – and the multi-dimensional Africa of the present day. Finally, one encounters the minds of […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg `So, how was the play?” asks a friend over dinner. How was the play? How do you describe Closer? A couple of hours after seeing Sello Maake ka Ncube’s production of Patrick Marber’s acclaimed contemporary British play, the whole thing is really only just beginning to sink in and […]
The dark genius of trip-hop grew up on mean streets. Most of his friends are still trawling them. Tricky revisits his roots with Kamal Ahmed They call me Tricky for particular reason They say I’m loud Why should I hide? The clouds that linger above Knowle West are not quite grey. If a paint company […]
It may be the cure for many sexual problems, but will Viagra get to the root of sexual relationships? Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times and David Shapshak report Viagra, the miracle impotence drug, may kickstart men’s libidos but it’s not the cure-all for dysfunctional relationships. While millions of men around the world have […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby If God had meant man to live in England, he’d have given him gills. That line kept recurring in my thoughts during two trips to the Cape last week. On Saturday Clive Woodward’s prayers were answered as the heavens opened and soft, suppressing rain fell on his England team at Newlands. On […]
Arizona North America is home to literally dozens of active stock exchanges, from the continent’s oldest in Philadelphia to Canada’s premier market place in Toronto. If you prefer something offbeat, there are the frozen floors of the Alberta Stock Exchange in Canada’s great white north or the arid airs of the little-known Arizona Stock Exchange. […]
Nick Paul, resplendent in designer khaki, gets lost in tent town and discovers the Durban July is little more than a freak show July day sits in the middle of Durban’s social calendar like a large, clever, sharp-tongued Berea matron with a fine mind and too much time on her hands. Everyone wants to be […]
Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL There are, I’m sure, many reasons to admire communists. One which dwarfs all others, though, is their talent for rationalisation. Their ability to explain away past failures in such a way as to be able to retain a set of ill-fitting core beliefs is quite remarkable. The origin of this […]
Dan Atkinson and Mail & Guardian reporter The World Cup hysteria which has obsessed South Africa confirmed the popularity of football, not to mention the power of marketing to induce frenzied emotion. This bodes well for the owners of any football teams which are planning to follow their overseas counterparts and list on the Johannesburg […]
The taxpayer footed the bill for the 177 IFP participants in the Shell House inquest, writes Mungo Soggot The Legal Aid Board paid almost R10- million for the Inkatha Freedom Party’s legal representation at the Shell House inquest last year – as much as the board’s annual allowance to university legal aid clinics. The IFP […]
Anthony Egan THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN SURFACE by Kate Turkington (Penguin) Historians, philosophers and even a few theologians have frequently declared the death of God and the end of religion. Yet today we see a religious resurgence on almost all fronts: pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity, often militant Islam, renewed interest in the occult, New […]
theft Mail & Guardian reporters The former Umkhonto weSizwe cadre heading the company that controls controversial Aids drug Virodene cut his business teeth in the Southern African criminal underworld. Former colleagues from the African National Congress’s years in exile claim Joshua Nxumalo had a reputation for “getting things done”, and that he specialised in providing […]
Suzy Bell In the light of the West’s insatiable hunger for exotic titbits to feed its cultural appetite, it is inspiring to come across a cross-cultural fusion where integrity has not been compromised. Music for a Harmonious World is a unique collaboration of the Seventh Day Adventist Student Association (SDASA) Chorale, an amateur gospel group […]
Andrew Muchineripi World Cup Seventy years after Frenchman Jules Rimet “sold” the idea of a quadrennial football championship to a surprisingly sceptical world, the country of his birth has reached the final for the first time. Semi-finalists in 1958, 1982 and 1986, Les Bleus finally realised the dream by coming from behind this week to […]
murdered? William Shawcross and Mail & Guardian reporters Was Chief Moshood Abiola murdered? That was the question on everyone’s lips in the villages, towns and cities of Nigeria as the human rights organisation Amnesty International demanded a full independent inquiry into the circumstances around the death in detention of the country’s lost president. “Of all […]
Chris McGreal Many will remember Chief Moshood Abiola as a political martyr denied presidential power, even though he came to prominence as an opportunist businessman, prepared to do deals with Nigeria’s soldiers until the very end. In the days before he died, Abiola had been ready to forsake his presidential claims, according to the various […]
Diane Coetzer For weeks, I tried to prise a CV out of YFM station manager Randall Abrahams. When I met with him at the station’s funkily appointed offices in Gauteng’s Bez Valley, we never really got to the details of Abrahams’s radio career so far, beyond discussing his early days on the University of Cape […]
`justice’ Tangeni Amupadhi Police officers are apparently turning to vigilantism because of growing disillusionment with the criminal justice system, says a research commissioned by the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD). In an incident earlier this year, Eastern Cape policemen shot dead four “fleeing robbers” in Umtata after they allegedly held up a Pep Stores branch and […]
Sechaba ka’Nkosi A single mother of three is conducting a lone mission to ensure that the largely masculine metal industry respects its female employees. So determined is Rain Chiya to prove that women are as capable of controlling massive machinery as men are, that she pushed her way into a position as a crane driver […]